ROBIN HAD TO MOVE the driver’s seat of the 88 all the way forward in order to reach the gas and brake pedals, which struck Linda as valid evidence that she wasn’t old enough to drive. Of course, Linda didn’t really believe she was old enough to drive yet, either, at twenty-eight. Maybe she never would be. But Robin suffered no such doubts about herself. She had been sitting out in the driveway for at least an hour now, turning the steering wheel and honking impatiently. “Linda!” she yelled every few minutes. “Come on! Let’s go!”
With the car keys safely in her jeans pocket, Linda went methodically about her chores, humming to herself and trying to ignore Robin, which was something like trying to ignore a screaming steam whistle. Still, she washed the breakfast dishes and made the beds, fed and diapered and dressed the baby, and even vacuumed a little before giving in. When she finally came out, carrying Phoebe and an armload of her paraphernalia, Robin leaned on the horn again, just for spite. “Stop that,” Linda said. “It’s not even nine o’clock, you’re waking up the whole neighborhood. And move over, missy, I’m driving.”
“What!” Robin said, outraged. “You said I could drive. You said—”
Linda interrupted her. “I said you could drive after we drop the baby off, remember? There’s no reason to endanger her poor little life, too. Now, come give me a hand with this stuff, will you?”
Robin climbed out of the car and grabbed Phoebe. “Hey, Feeble, we’re going to … drop you off!” she shouted, tossing the baby into the air and barely catching her on the emphasis.
“Robin!” Linda shrieked. “You could kill her that way! And, besides, she just ate.” But the traitorous baby only laughed with rippling pleasure and kept her breakfast to herself.
Linda drove toward Cynthia Sterling’s, where Phoebe would be looked after until the driving lesson was over. This was the third time Cynthia had volunteered to take her when Robin couldn’t sit. She was turning out to be such a valuable friend. “Big deal,” Robin had commented the night before when Linda was singing Cynthia’s praises. “Ms. Rich Bitch will just get one of her slaves to babysit.”
“They’re not slaves, Robin, they’re servants,” Linda said.
“Same difference,” Robin said. She had an answer for everything. And she was so paranoid; according to her, Cynthia intended to kidnap Phoebe and turn her into a “slave,” too.
Now, all the way from Hollywood to Benedict Canyon, Robin heckled and instructed Linda. “Faster. Faster” was her steady refrain on the freeway, and when they drove locally, she kept urging Linda to run over anybody crossing against the light. She even opened her window and yelled “Roadkill!” at a couple of startled pedestrians, and then argued that they were just asking for it. She couldn’t seem to sit still for a minute, and Linda worried that she was on speed or something. First, Robin turned on all four air-conditioning jets full blast in her own direction, so that her hair blew wildly around her face while Linda sweltered, only inches away. Then she pushed the radio buttons rapidly from one rock station to another, and bounced around to the noise that filled the car. She lingered longest, it seemed, on any number with a violent message and a grating beat. Linda wondered once again what she was doing trying to teach someone like Robin to drive. It was really criminal, like putting a loaded Uzi into the hands of a known serial killer. She thought of those amusement parks they’d stopped at on their trip West, at Robin’s insistence, and her insistence that they try all the dangerous rides, monstrous contraptions with names like “Death Rocket” and “Trip to Hell” that spun you madly around, or turned you upside down and inside out until you were nothing but streaming hair and tangled guts and a sustained, high-pitched scream. Linda had begged off everything but the safe and sane Tunnel of Love, using her pregnancy as an alibi, but she wouldn’t have been too willing under any circumstances. Robin went on the other rides by herself, anyway, while Linda stood there watching her and feeling almost as queasy as she would have been aboard. Even on the benign bumper cars, Robin had driven head-on into other cars with what seemed like malicious glee. But she was full of adolescent bluff and bluster; all the awful things she’d threatened to do since Linda had known her, and then hadn’t, could fill a book.
The one thing Robin seemed sincerely determined about, though, was driving a real car. She had been talking for months about getting her learner’s permit, and right before her fifteenth birthday, in early July, she’d signed up for the Driver’s Ed course offered in summer school. Her grades in English and social studies had fallen off considerably the past semester, but driving was the only subject she’d volunteered to take during her vacation. Linda knew that if she opposed her, Robin would simply “borrow” the car one day without anyone’s blessings, including the state’s. She’d managed to pass Drivers Ed somehow and get her precious permit, but she definitely needed further instruction, and lots of practice.
Linda couldn’t afford to pay for professional lessons, so Nathan had promised to do the teaching for her. He’d come up with several reasons why Linda was unsuitable for the job: she was too nervous, Robin didn’t like or respect her, and her own driving stank, no offense. He said that she drove like a little old lady, stiffly and slowly, as if she’d once been reckless but had learned her lesson. He hunched over in cruel imitation of her, staring bug-eyed into an imaginary distance and holding an imaginary wheel in a steel grip. When Linda squealed in protest and swatted at him with a magazine, he tried to temper the insult by kissing her neck and shoulders. And when she mentioned, as tactfully as she could, that he’d been stopped for speeding twice recently, he brushed her off in that same exasperating way, telling her to just let him take care of everything, muñeca, okay? Nathan had once worked at a driving school in San Diego (where hadn’t he worked?), and he claimed there wasn’t a driver born he couldn’t handle. Linda certainly wasn’t looking forward to teaching Robin to drive, and Nathan and Robin did seem to be getting along much better. But when he took her out in the 88 the following Sunday, they came back less than an hour later, both of them grim-faced and ominously silent. “What?” Linda asked in alarm. “What happened?”
No one bothered to answer her. Robin slammed into her bedroom, and Nathan splashed some cold water on his face before he slammed out of the house and roared away in his Z. When Linda tried to raise the subject with him the next evening when they were alone, he muttered angrily to himself in Spanish, like Ricky Ricardo after Lucy had just pulled some crazy stunt, and she was afraid to press the matter any further. Robin was even less forthcoming. Linda asked her, “Did you have an accident or anything, honey?” and Robin looked right through her with slitted eyes and didn’t deign to reply. Linda seemed able to read her mind, though, something that was happening more and more lately. Maybe it was a common phenomenon between people who lived together for a long time. What Robin appeared to say was, “I had an accident, all right, asshole, and you’re it.” Or, “Yeah, I had a terrible accident—I was born.” Either way, Linda didn’t want to hear about it.
So the driving instruction was left up to her. After they delivered the baby to Cynthia, they were going to a supermarket a couple of miles away maybe the only one in all of Southern California that wasn’t open around the clock. For some reason, probably to do with either religion or sports, the Food Bazaar didn’t open until noon on Sundays, and the huge, empty parking lot would be a perfect place for Robin to practice. And at twelve, when the market opened, they could get some groceries. Margarine, milk, detergent, oranges—Linda made a mental shopping list as she drove, feeling marvelously efficient for once.
The approach to Cynthia’s house, her mansion, still delighted Linda; it was like entering an enchanted forest. But Cynthia was hardly the fairy-tale ogre and slave driver Robin made her out to be. If she was, they wouldn’t be here now, would they? In the driveway, Linda got out and struggled to the front door with the baby and all of her gear. She rang the doorbell with her left elbow, setting off the chimes and starting the dogs barking and howling inside. Robin stayed safely in the car, just in case someone let them out again. In moments, Lupe appeared and whisked Phoebe away. Cynthia came out next, followed by her handsome young houseman/chauffeur (whose name, Linda had found out, was Mitchell, not Mellors). He relieved Linda of the diaper bag, the Muppets mobile, and the folded stroller, and carried them inside. “So long, kids,” Cynthia called, so as to include Robin, who had moved over to the driver’s seat of the 88 the second Linda vacated it. “Remember—drive safely now!”
“Yeah, right,” Robin called back as she revved the idling engine, “and you remember who that baby belongs to!”
“Robin!” Linda said, and then turned to smile at Cynthia in apology, but she had already gone into the house and shut the door. “You’re crazy, do you know that?” Linda said to Robin as she got in beside her. “Now, don’t forget to fasten your seat belt, and are you wearing shoes?” But even as Robin pressed her bare foot to the gas pedal and peeled out across the gravel, Linda looked anxiously back at the many inscrutable windows of the big house, suddenly longing for one more glimpse of her child.
There was another car at the Food Bazaar when they got there, a silver Chevy Caprice with a teenage boy behind the wheel, and a man, probably his father, sitting erectly beside him. The boy drove in slow motion past the 88 as it entered the parking field, and Linda could make out all the details of his long white face, the geography of his freckles and pimples and silky stubble, the way the sunlight shone pinkly through his protruding ears, and how his mouth hung open in absolute concentration. Linda thought he looked desperate, as if he were being kidnapped and couldn’t signal for help with anything but his eyes, which rolled like a spooked horse’s as the cars passed one another. The father and Linda were the real captives, though, and she sent him a telepathic message of empathy and courage.
“Oh, shit, traffic,” Robin said. Of course she was only being sarcastic. She’d wanted to take her lesson on the freeway, but Linda wouldn’t risk that in an armored tank with Robin driving.
“Don’t be smart,” she warned her, and leaned forward to shut off the radio, which Robin had allowed to settle on a rap station, adding to Linda’s feelings of apprehension.
Robin flipped it right back on. Then she said, “Hey, I know that kid,” turning her head in the direction of the Caprice. “What a retard.”
Linda sighed. Robin always said she knew people when she clearly didn’t. It was just a cover, Linda thought, for her own loneliness, an adolescent version of imaginary friends. “You do not know him, Robin,” Linda said. “Now keep your eyes on the road, please, and don’t forget to signal.” Her head was beginning to ache. She turned the radio down a little.
“Road?” Robin said, snorting. “You call this a road?”
She was only doing about twenty, but it felt to Linda as if they were zipping past the light poles: A1, A2, A3; past the handicapped spaces, with their blue lines and universal wheelchair symbols; past the windows of the Food Bazaar with its advertised specials on chicken breasts and rump roasts; past the chained gang of shopping carts; and the silver Caprice with its retarded, wild-eyed, teenage driver.
Linda felt grudging admiration for Robin, who grasped the wheel and went forward with such unwarranted confidence. Linda would never have learned to drive if Wright hadn’t gently but firmly nudged her toward independent flight, like a mother bird. If he had lived to teach Robin to drive, too, he never would have lost his temper, or his determination to have her succeed. That’s the way he’d been with Linda, even after two trained driving-school instructors had declared her unteachable. The main trouble was that she would think too much, think: this is the brake, this is the gas, this is the clutch, and, oh, God, this is me driving! That would quickly lead to: this is me married, and a stepmother besides! And from there it was an easy leap to: a few weeks ago I was single, and not long before that, I was a child myself; once I never existed at all, and someday I won’t again, forever and ever. Her mind often tumbled out of control that way, down into a spiral of black thoughts that inevitably ended in the grave. It wasn’t something she could help doing, or comfortably confide to anyone—it seemed so neurotic and childish—so she never tried. When Wright rubbed her back and asked her what was wrong and why she couldn’t just relax, she blamed it on her high-strung nature. “You know me,” she’d say, and he would smile, although he didn’t really know her, not in that most acutely intimate sense. And neither did Nathan, who was a sweetheart in most respects, except for his short fuse and his tendency to be bossy. He would never gently inquire of her what was wrong; he would probably shout orders and accusations in two languages, instead. She could just imagine the circumstances of Robin’s aborted driving lesson last Sunday.
Again, Robin drove past the silver car, and this time the man in the passenger seat turned slightly to look at Linda, with what she perceived as interest. Like a swinger out cruising for women, instead of a father teaching his child to drive. In the brief moment of their passing, Linda noticed that he had thick sandy hair and a pleasant crinkly look around his eyes. Green eyes, or hazel, she thought. And he looked tall, if you could really tell that about somebody sitting down. Anyway, he was more her usual type than Nathan, who was compactly built and so exotically handsome, almost pretty, with his endless eyelashes and creamy mocha skin. God, what was she thinking about?
Just then, Robin began using the light poles as a kind of obstacle course, by zigzagging between them. “What are you doing?” Linda demanded. “Stop that this minute!”
“But this is so boring,” Robin complained. “Why can’t we go on the freeway?”
“Because,” Linda told her, “I want to live to be twenty-nine. And slow down, will you?”
“We’re practically standing still now,” Robin said. “If I go any slower, we’ll be going backward in this ugly, decrepit car.” It was true that the 88 wasn’t glamorous, with its dull tan finish and worn plaid seat covers, but it got you where you wanted to go, even if that was only in circles in an empty parking lot. Robin kept grumbling, but she slowed down and straightened the car out just as the Caprice passed them once more, going in the opposite direction. Again, Linda found herself arrested by the glance of the driver’s father. This time he smiled, and before she could stop herself she smiled back.
“Who are you smiling at?” Robin asked immediately, as if she had a side-view mirror attached to her head.
“I’m not smiling, I’m gritting my teeth, you make me so nervous.”
“You were smiling at that guy, weren’t you—at that retard’s father. God!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Linda said, more annoyed with herself than with Robin. She knew very well that her love life was a sore point between them; Robin often intimated that Linda was promiscuous—although that wasn’t the word she used—and she couldn’t understand why anyone was attracted to her in the first place, beginning with Robin’s own father. Sexual attraction was a mystery Linda wasn’t prepared to solve or explain, but she was certainly not promiscuous. If anything, she was absurdly faithful. It wasn’t her fault that some of her relationships ended abruptly when the man in question died. Robin treated her like someone old and out of it, who should have been cremated along with Wright, or buried with Manny. But this was the prime of her life, even if she hadn’t entirely gotten the hang of it yet.
Linda stole a peek at her watch—the dashboard clock was fixed forever at 2:35—and saw that it was only a little after ten. It actually was boring, riding around and around like this; she didn’t know how much more of it she could take. There was no law that said she had to let Robin continue driving until noon, so she cleared her throat and said, “I think that’s about enough for today dear. You did very nicely, though.”
“What!” Robin said, ignoring both the false tribute and the implicit order to stop. “I don’t believe you! I hardly drove at all!”
“Tomorrow is another day,” Linda sang out gaily, even though there really wouldn’t be a lesson the next day, and she knew how much Robin hated that kind of cliché. “Let’s pull over now, please.”
“Tomorrow!” Robin said scornfully, as she continued to drive. “What’s the matter? Can’t wait to see your stupid boyfriend?”
“Nathan isn’t even home,” Linda said, hating herself for dignifying Robin’s accusation by responding at all. “He’s down in San Diego for the weekend, on business.” What kind of business, she suddenly wondered.
“I meant him,” Robin said, indicating the stranger in the Caprice, which they were passing again for the zillionth time. And to make matters worse, the man chose that moment to wave to Linda. She didn’t wave back, although that took the effort of one hand holding the other one down in her lap.
“My, what an imagination you have!” Linda exclaimed. But it was her own imagination that was unleashed by Robin’s remark, and by the man’s friendly gesture. In her mind’s eye she’d already eliminated Robin and her teenage male counterpart from the picture. The man, whose name, she decided, was either Mike or Dan, was recently divorced—no, widowed—and he was having a terrible time dealing with his loss and his sense of isolation. All he really wanted was someone nice to talk to, someone who’d understand what he was going through, someone who loved to dance and eat Chinese food—someone, perhaps, whose favorite author was J. D. Salinger. The week before, Linda and Nathan were lying in his bed, pleasantly spent from lovemaking, when she asked if he’d ever thought she had named Phoebe for Holden Caulfield’s sister. And Nathan, predictably enough, had said, sleepily, “Who?”
As Robin drove on, Linda was transported to a charmingly furnished house in the Valley, where she and Mike were sitting in front of a blazing fire, sipping wine. When he dipped his head to kiss her, she felt the pleasure of affection along with the sexual thrill. It was companionship Linda craved as much as love, a concept Robin would never understand, and would probably mock, as she mocked just about every important thing Linda tried to tell her. Linda had to admit that she dismissed a great deal of what Robin said, too. But that was because the girl couldn’t seem to separate the truth from her fantasies anymore. That business about Cynthia plotting to steal Phoebe, for instance. Still, Robin’s overprotection of her baby sister was kind of sweet. Their physical resemblance became more striking every day, especially now that Phoebe had some hair. Robin had really freaked out last week when they discovered that Cynthia had trimmed it just a teensy bit, had made a feathery fringe of bangs so it wouldn’t get in her eyes, like Robin’s always did. You would think Cynthia had performed major surgery on Phoebe, the way Robin carried on. In fact, that was what she warned Linda was probably coming next. “You’ll go there,” she said, “and Feeb will have, like, this nose job, and maybe she’ll be a brunette or something. One of the slaves will come to the door with those killer dogs and tell you you’ve got the wrong place. No habla ingles, señorita. Adios!” It was a perfectly ridiculous scenario, and typical of Robin, once she got going. Hadn’t she warned Wright that Linda was only after his money? What money, she’d like to know. The debts he’d left behind had almost depleted his meager savings, and now Linda was working overtime to support the family he’d bequeathed her. But when Robin spouted all that nonsense about Cynthia, Linda had shivered, involuntarily. That was the trouble—people with overactive imaginations tended to be contagious. Before she knew it, Linda began to have her own disturbing thoughts, which she didn’t bother to share with Robin. Starting with the white cashmere blanket that came home with the baby the last time she stayed with Cynthia. It was clearly very expensive—amazingly dense and weightless at once, and the color of vanilla yogurt. “Where did this come from?” Linda asked, and Cynthia only smiled and shrugged, as if cashmere blankets fell from the sky. Maybe they did, if you lived in the right neighborhood. “We went shopping,” Cynthia finally said, “and it was on sale, and you know our Bebe, she can never resist a bargain.” They laughed together over that and Linda thanked her, profusely but said she really shouldn’t have, it was wonderful enough that she’d kept the baby all day like that. It was only after she got home and put the baby to sleep under the beautiful blanket, and finished dinner, that she allowed herself to remember that Cynthia had said, “Bebe,” not “Phoebe.”
Once, when Linda was a young girl, a neighbor adopted a dog from the local pound. The dog was about five years old and was named Rusty, which the neighbor decided didn’t suit him. She wanted to call him Prince instead, but she knew that a mature dog wouldn’t answer to a new name just like that. So she changed his name a little bit every few days. She called him “Dusty” first, which was so similar to “Rusty” he came running without hesitation. A couple of days later he became “Dustin,” and then, after that, “Justin.” Linda couldn’t remember exactly how they ever got to Prince, but she was positive it took weeks, and that soon afterward the dog was hit by a bus and killed while running across the road in response to his final name. There really wasn’t any connection between that awful story and what Cynthia had called the baby, although Linda was sure Robin would have thought of one, and, somehow, recalling it now made her unreasonably uneasy.
Robin had circumnavigated the parking lot so many times Linda was getting a little carsick. She’d memorized all the specials in the supermarket window and had completely forgotten her own shopping list. The Caprice was still stuck in orbit, too, and its horn tooted a little melodic greeting when it went by this time. “Honk back,” Linda told Robin. “It’s only friendly.”
“That dweeb,” Robin said, without complying. “He’s the one I told you about, the one that collects stamps or dead butterflies or something.” She had never told her anything of the sort. “I think his dad just got out of jail,” she added, with a shifty little side-glance at Linda.
Linda refused to take the bait. “Why don’t you just concentrate on what you’re doing?” she said.
“Why don’t you?” Robin said, one of her typically empty and insolent responses.
“Don’t be fresh,” Linda told her.
“Don’t you be fresh,” Robin retorted. And then, murmuring so low Linda could barely hear her, she said, “Slut.”
“That’s it, Robin,” Linda announced. “Pull over. Let’s go! Right now!”
“What did I do?” Robin said. “I didn’t do anything!”
She went right on driving, and Linda wished the 88 was equipped with dual controls, like the cars they’d used back at the Ben Hur Driving School in Newark. When she’d taken her own futile lessons there, the instructor kept slamming on his set of brakes to keep their car from colliding with other cars and lampposts and trees. Now Linda wanted to put an end to this monotonous ride and to Robin’s assumed command of the car and their lives. She pumped her foot furiously against the floor mat, but Robin only speeded up a little in defiance. “Slow down!” Linda said. “Do you hear me?”
“Did somebody say something?” Robin said.
“Young lady, you are in deep trouble!” Linda cried.
“Blah, blah, blah,” said Robin, leaning forward as she stepped up the speed even more.
“You are grounded!” Linda shouted, thinking what an odd thing it was to say when they appeared to be flying. Now things were truly whizzing by, and she felt the same sort of panic she’d felt watching the whirl and plunge of those terrible amusement-park rides. When Robin careened around a corner of the lot, the whole car shook and seemed to lean perilously to one side. Linda kept yelling for her to stop, and when that didn’t work she began to simply scream. Each time they sped past the other car, its driver and passenger blurred into a single two-headed, openmouthed creature. Her screams might have been coming from them, or from one or both of the cars’ horns, or from the overwrought engine of the 88 as Robin took it to its limits. But over all the compounded noise, Linda could distinctly hear Robin yelling, “Linda, I can’t! It’s stuck! Oh, shit, fuck! Linda, help me! Help!” Linda looked down and saw Robin’s black-painted toenails splayed against the accelerator. “The brake, the brake! Use the brake!” she cried, and when she looked up again, Mike, Dan, the man in the Caprice, was zooming toward her, staring with an intensity she had only seen before in the face of a lover closing in for a kiss. And as if he were a lover, she shut her eyes against the exquisite moment of impact.
The world seemed to come back into focus as suddenly as it had vanished. Linda was lying alone across the front seat of the car, with her feet through the open door, and the dashboard hanging above her head, which ached fiercely. The radio was still playing—some heavy-metal number pulsed diligently near her ear—but whoever was screaming had considerately moved away, so that sound, at least, was muted and bearable. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she heard someone say. “Don’t move,” someone else warned, and she almost laughed at the notion of moving, bringing a searing pain to her ribs. “Robin?” she inquired.
A man leaned in over her. “It’s okay, they’re coming,” he said mysteriously. And then the screaming turned out to be a siren that kept growing louder before it stopped abruptly on an agonized high note, as if someone had strangled the screamer.
In the emergency room, they crowded around her and asked her name, and did she know where she was and who the President was. Linda confessed that she hadn’t voted for him, but that wasn’t what they wanted to know. Her left leg had fallen asleep, and her mouth tasted as if she’d been sucking on pennies. When she tried to tell them that, they pricked her with needles and set up an IV. And when they turned her head to one side, she saw that the man from the Caprice was lying on an adjacent gurney, looking back at her with his crinkly green eyes—well, one eye, anyway, since the other one was swollen shut. “Listen … sorry, so sorry …” she murmured.
“You stupid bitch, I’m going to sue your ass off,” he said loudly and clearly, just before someone yanked a curtain closed between them.
Linda woke again in the recovery room, to somebody else’s moaning. Her own pain was everywhere, but it was blunted, like a memory of pain. A nurse told her where she was and that she was doing just fine. The leg had needed surgery, but the arm was a clean break and easy to set. Linda saw the casts then—right arm, left leg—and felt their onerous weight. With her free hand, she traced her inflated mouth; her nose, which seemed stuffed but intact; and the tightly taped ribs. “Robin?” she said thickly, and the nurse said, “Uh-uh, dearie, I’m Paula.” It was much too much trouble to explain, so Linda croaked, “Hi. Linda,” right before she faded out again.
And then she was in another, smaller room, with an old woman lying in a bed across from her, watching television. Robin was there, too, her round pale face hovering above Linda’s like a full moon. “You okay, Linda?” she whispered. “I’m really, really sorry. But it wasn’t my fault, I swear. It was an accident.”
“How are you?” Linda asked through her rubber lips.
“Huh? Fine, I guess,” Robin said. “Like my knees and elbows are scraped and stuff, that’s all. I got thrown out of the car the minute we hit.”
“Seat belt,” Linda said.
“Yeah, I guess I wasn’t wearing mine.”
“The other car?”
“Totaled, just like ours. But you were hurt the worst.” She said it almost proudly. “You know, your leg and your arm and everything. They think your head’s okay, though.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Late. Like almost nighttime.”
“Phoebe!” Linda gasped.
“It’s okay, don’t worry. I called Ms. Rich … I called Cynthia and told her. She’s coming right over.”
Before Cynthia showed up, though, Nathan did. He was supposed to be in San Diego, wasn’t he? Linda wondered how he knew what had happened. She was sure Robin wouldn’t have bothered to inform him, and she did seem as surprised to see him as Linda was. As Robin retreated to a corner of the room, Nathan came to Linda’s bedside and stared down at her. “Holy shit,” he said softly. Then he bent and kissed her forehead and her fingers, arching his body carefully away from hers. Linda attempted something like a smile. “Right,” she said.
“What?” Nathan asked. “No, don’t try and talk now, mi vida. Just rest.”
“You were right,” she said.
“Yeah, I know, but who wants to be right all the time?”
“You,” she said.
“Shhh,” he told her.
“Supposed to be … in San Diego.”
“I missed you, so I came home early.”
“But how did you …”
“You mean, how did I find out? I got worried about the two of you, so I drove over to the market where you said you were going.”
He was probably planning to heckle her a little, to give unsolicited advice, to take over.
“I got there maybe twenty minutes after it happened,” he said. “It looked like a war zone—glass, oil, foam, the works. The tow trucks were trying to separate the cars and hook them up. One of the guys called on his radio to find out where they took you. I figured the morgue, myself. I’ve been downstairs for hours, they wouldn’t let me up here until now.” He turned toward Robin, “So, how are you doing there, Andretti?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Robin mumbled.
“I’ll bet,” Nathan said.
“Nobody asked you—” Robin began belligerently, and then stopped when she saw that Linda’s eyes had filled with tears.
“Hey,” Nathan said, “hey, we’re not really fighting.” He reached out and grabbed Robin and pulled her against his side. She struggled to get away, but he held her firmly by the shoulder. “See?” Nathan said. “Pals!”
“It’s not th-that,” Linda said, starting to sob.
“Are you in pain, Lindy?” he asked. “I’ll go get the nurse.”
“No,” she blubbered, “no!” even though the pain was asserting itself again.
“Is it the car, then?” he said. “But you’ve got insurance, right? And you never liked that old heap, anyway, remember? Listen, sweetheart, everything’s going to be okay, I promise you.”
How could he say that? Everything in the world was wrong. The pain was becoming more and more demanding, and an itch was starting to crawl somewhere under the cast on her leg. How was she going to dance or walk, or do anything at all? How was she going to earn a living? And Robin’s school was going to reopen before long—who would take care of Phoebe? God, when had she nursed her last? She realized that her swollen breasts were making their own minor contribution to her body’s major discomfort.
A nurse came into the room and hustled Nathan and Robin out. She gave Linda a shot for the pain, checked her IV and her catheter, and left. The woman in the other bed spoke for the first time since Linda arrived. “Is that your husband?” she asked.
“No,” Linda said. “Just a friend.”
“Some friend,” the woman said. “He looks exactly like Rudolph Valentino. You wouldn’t remember him.”
“Not personally,” Linda said.
“He died young. In a hospital,” the woman told her.
“Mmm,” Linda said, politely. She was glad when Nathan, and then Robin, came in again. A moment later, Cynthia arrived, too, with an armful of flowers.
“Oh, my,” she said as she approached Linda’s bed. “How does the other guy look?”
“Well, his eye was a little swollen—” Linda began, but Cynthia waved the flowers at Robin, and said, “Be a love and get a vase for these, will you?”
Robin gave Cynthia her darkest look, but she grabbed the flowers, shaking a few petals loose in the process, and marched out of the room.
“For I am born to tame you, Kate!” Cynthia called after her.
“It’s Robin,” Linda said. By then Cynthia and Nathan were eyeing one another critically across Linda’s bed, and the woman in the other bed had shut off her television set and was observing them all, as if they were a spin-off of the show she’d been watching.
“Where’s the baby?” Linda asked Cynthia.
“Off in dreamland, where you should probably be, too.”
“Linda needs to feed her,” Nathan said.
“She’s been fed,” Cynthia answered. “She’s perfectly safe and sound and happy. Listen, Linda, we’ll get you a breast pump, and you’ll feel a lot more comfortable. I’m going to see someone in charge and find out what’s going on with you, anyway. Maybe we can get you transferred to Cedars. I know the chief of orthopedics there.”
“Maybe she wants to stay here,” Nathan said.
“I beg your pardon,” Cynthia said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Oh, sorry,” Linda said, as if she were a negligent hostess at a cocktail party. “Cynthia … Nathan.” The painkiller was starting to take effect and she was too woozy to deal with their last names. She could hardly remember them anyway. Robin came in and took a neutral position at the foot of the bed, clutching a urinal crammed with Cynthia’s flowers, and Linda felt like Snow White in her glass coffin, surrounded by the grieving dwarfs. Except that the people around her bed seemed more irritable than sad. A bell began chiming for visitors to leave. Linda heard it dimly, but gratefully, through the cotton batting of her brain.
After the goodbyes, Nathan said, “Come on, Robin, I’ll drive you home,” and Cynthia said, “I’ll do it. She’s sleeping at my place tonight.” “I am not,” Robin said. Cynthia said something back, and Nathan answered her, and then they all shuffled out, murmuring disagreeably among themselves.
Linda was almost asleep when she felt a presence nearby. She opened her eyes and saw Cynthia leaning over her. “Good God, Linda,” she said, “where did you find macho man—at a border check?” Linda was still trying to make proper sense of that when Cynthia added, “Don’t you worry about anything, sweetie. Just concentrate on getting well. Little Bebe is in good hands.”
Linda struggled to stay conscious long enough to answer. “The name … is … Rusty,” she said, and then gave herself back to the darkness.