Family

SEVEN

They named the baby Robin, a name Leslie liked. Leslie slept a lot at first, so Nick hired a professional nurse to live in and help out. The nurse was a dour, middle-aged prune of a woman named Aggie Mason, and the very first thing she did was try to coax Leslie into a haircut. She said that now that Leslie was a mother, she’d be too busy to fuss with her hair.

“But it’s no fuss,” Leslie said. “It’s wash and drip dry.”

The nurse frowned. She said a mother should look mature and responsible, and not have hair long enough to strangle a baby. “I know a child who was rushed to surgery with stomach cramps and they had to cut her open,” Aggie said. “Know what they found?” She paused, dramatically. “A hair ball. As big as my fist.”

Leslie stifled a laugh. “My husband loves my hair,” she said.

“Oh, husbands,” Aggie said, and this time Leslie laughed.

Nick was grateful for the nurse. He liked it that she was older, that she had looked after countless babies in her time, and that she was overcautious. She liked things running smoothly, efficiently, safely. She stayed in the spare room and kept it meticulously clean. She vacuumed the whole house twice just to get rid of all the pins. She warned Leslie about making the house babyproof, about getting a lock for the sewing room so she could seal it up when she wasn’t using it. “One room for sewing is smarter than using the whole house,” Aggie said. “Especially with a little one.” Leslie told her she was much too weary right now to even think about doing a hem, much less any project.

Nick liked the nurse more and more. He was sure nothing could ever happen to Robin while she was there. And it was funny, but with Aggie there, he felt safe to go in and look at his girl. Aggie distrusted him, though. Every time he went near the baby, she followed him. She barely let him hold Robin before she took the baby from him, reminding him that it was nap time or feeding time or some other kind of time that he wasn’t supposed to be a part of.

Aggie was with them for two months. Nick begged her to stay on an extra month or so, but Leslie insisted that she was strong enough to handle things.

Nick was surprised at how easy it was for Aggie to leave. He had thought baby nurses got attached to their charges. He had read about nurses writing to the kids they had looked after for years after they left, visiting and calling, and even ending up taking care of the kids of their kids. All Aggie did was present Leslie with a list of stores that sold sterilized bottles and carried the right brand of diaper at the right price. She pecked Robin on one downy cheek and then got her suitcase and carried it herself to a waiting cab. Nick wanted to drive her to the train himself, but she shook her head, said she liked to end things at the place where they were ending. Nick opened the door of the cab, and as she scooted in, he said, “You’ll miss her, won’t you?”

Aggie smiled. “Only until the second I take the new one into my arms,” she said. Then she settled herself in and turned to wave to Leslie, who was standing in the doorway, Robin in her arms. Leslie lifted Robin’s baby hand and waved it. “Say goodbye,” she said.

Robin didn’t look like either one of them. She had red curls, gray eyes, and skin so fair that Leslie had to put a sun block on her just to carry her out to the car. Robin burned anyway. It made Leslie wince to see a baby all red like that, but Robin was strangely oblivious. She never seemed to mind. She was that way about other things, too. She’d sleep in diapers so soggy that she’d wake chafed and raw. She’d bruise her mouth against the rails of her crib and never cry.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with her?” Leslie worried to her mother.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, count your blessings,” Leslie’s mother said. “So she doesn’t cry. Big deal.” Then she regaled Leslie with a long and irritating story about what a crier Leslie had been, how she had once stuffed her own ears with cotton just to get a moment or two of peace.

Robin was, as Leslie’s mother kept saying, a child of danger, a child protected. And she seemed to grow more and more nervy. Before Leslie could stop her, Robin tried to crawl onto the neighbor’s foul-tempered cat, Ralph, who scratched everything he came in contact with. Oddly, Ralph merely yawned and twitched free, leaving the baby surprised and blinking. Robin was curious about all the things she should leave alone—wall sockets, the knife Nick used to carve the meat, Leslie’s endless supply of pins. She reached, she grabbed, she sometimes got, but she was never harmed.

Like the water baby she was, Robin couldn’t get enough of water. She relaxed in her bath, becoming stiff and cranky only when Leslie tried to pluck her out. When it rained, Leslie swore Robin perked up. Leslie would sometimes carry her over to the big picture window in the living room and the baby would stare, mesmerized by the raindrops smearing paths down the blurry glass.

Leslie adored her daughter, but sometimes she had an uneasy feeling that the adoration wasn’t quite mutual, that Robin could do fine on her own, thank you. It bothered Leslie that the baby never cried out its need for her; Leslie always had to go and check to see if Robin was wet or hungry. It seemed a slight to her.

Robin wasn’t an affectionate baby, either. All through her pregnancy, Leslie had daydreamed about what a comfort a baby would be when Nick was on the road. But now the house seemed lonelier than ever. Robin didn’t like Leslie’s constant touch; she pulled away from hugs and kisses. Leslie tried to bring Robin into the bed with her, but Robin struggled and screamed; she wouldn’t quiet down until she was back in her own room, alone and content.

Leslie couldn’t help it—she began to think she had the wrong baby, that the hospital had made some mistake. She had read about such things. Once, in the dentist’s office she had read a whole article in Woman’s Day about such a mistake: two boy babies given to the wrong parents. One of the mothers kept thinking something wasn’t quite right—just a mother’s instinct—and did a little investigating. She found that her baby’s footprint didn’t match the one made shortly after her baby’s birth. There was a big scandal. The hospital was sued, and both babies were returned to their rightful parents, but who knew what damage had been done?

Of course, that had happened at a tiny hospital in some little headache of a town she’d never heard of. Robin had been born at Magee, the best hospital in Pittsburgh. Still, Leslie kept thinking about it. A loving little girl in someone else’s home, a baby who dreamed of her rightful mother’s kisses, of a lap to cradle in.

Leslie got up her courage and called Magee. At first she pretended she was doing research. She spoke to someone in PR about the likelihood of such an event, but the woman was annoyed. Things like that happened once in a blue moon, she said, and certainly never at Magee.

Leslie wouldn’t give up. She took new prints of Robin’s feet, and then requested a set from the hospital. When they came, she saw they were identical. She sat on the couch, missing Nick, lonely for her daughter, and then she bunched up a pillow along her chest, like a baby, and she wept.

It was different for Nick. He had loved the baby when she was just an idea, just a swelling in his wife’s body. He had fallen more in love with Leslie and his life with her as the pregnancy went along, and if he had been a little unnerved by Robin’s birth, well, Aggie’s rigid control had calmed a lot of his fears.

Now, though, with Aggie gone, Robin seemed completely left open to life, and he had this vague new fear. He couldn’t admit it to Leslie. He kept trying to remind himself that Leslie’s mother had said Robin was a child protected, but sometimes he’d catch a glimpse of Robin’s fiery hair and could almost swear he saw flame, a whole crazy corona of it about her head. He’d hear her burble, and layered within her small voice he heard Susan. It made him crazy. Late at night, he’d jerk awake, riding on all these mad thoughts about Robin being Susan reincarnated, about it being a new kind of test. He was going to have to make sure nothing bad ever happened to this second chance of a girl. He was going to have to be doubly careful.

He tried. He double- and triple-checked the locks on the doors and the windows. When he rode with Robin in the car, he made sure she was strapped into her car seat in back. When he was away, he’d call Leslie in the middle of the night because he missed her, and because he wanted her to go and check on Robin. “Hey, I do my job here,” Leslie said, and he laughed and made some lame joke; he didn’t tell her that he needed to know that Robin was still alive. When he came home, he was always a little startled to see the baby creeping toward him, unharmed.

At night he slipped into her room to make sure she was still breathing. He’d crouch over her crib, watching her small chest rise and fall. He’d place one finger near her damp mouth to feel her breath. He wanted to sleep beside her so he could match his breaths to hers, so the strength of his heartbeat might feed hers.

She let him pick her up. She yawned like a cat. In the middle of the night, he sat in the rocker and whispered to her and sang. She curled around him. He was half-asleep one evening when he saw Leslie. At first he thought it was just a dream. She was naked, shadowed in the doorway, her hair a wash of ink over her pale skin. “Leslie,” he said, and then Robin stirred and he set her gently back in her crib.

“I bet she didn’t want to be put back there, did she?” Leslie said. “Not by you.”

Nick stroked Leslie’s hair from one shoulder and bent to kiss her bare skin.

“I love you more than she does,” Leslie said.

Robin grew. She was astonishingly healthy. She turned three, then four, escaping mumps and measles, chicken pox and the flu; even the few colds she did contract seemed to evaporate within days. But the funny thing was, the healthier she became and the firmer her hold to life, the more uneasy Nick was. He couldn’t help thinking of it as borrowed time; he couldn’t quite believe that she was really his for any sort of duration. The more birthdays she celebrated, the surer he was of their impending end. He told himself she had passed the danger point. She was older now than Susan had ever had a chance to be. He should relax now, loosen up, but he found himself still apprehensive.

He didn’t want to be a bad father. He didn’t want his wife wondering about him, his daughter scarred. He took her to the playground and tried not to see the rusty nails studded into the swings, the germs on the slides. At the zoo, he worried about the bears escaping; on trains, he saw gunmen. He couldn’t enjoy himself; he kept hurrying Robin, until she got cranky.

He punished her only once. She was playing with matches, oblivious to his approach, and he yanked them from her fingers and smacked her so hard that she tumbled against the wall, hitting her head. She didn’t cry—she seldom did—but she wouldn’t approach him for days afterward. He couldn’t bring himself to apologize, and he scoured the house for matches, tossing them all out, pack by pack. Later he heard Leslie speaking quietly to Robin, calming her with some story about Mr. Fire and Silly Milly, and he loved her for doing what he himself could not.

He did tell Robin stories, though—his father’s tales about strange lands. He’d feel himself reeling right back through time. He’d remember the raw, scratchy feeling of Tom’s shirt, the way his father’s aftershave smelled. He made up his own stories for Robin, too—tales involving the two of them. They went on wonderful adventures to strange planets; they could change themselves into animals just by twitching their noses.

It was so easy being father and daughter in those stories. It was simple to face dangers, because he could control them all, he knew just how everything would come out: He and Robin were always rescued “just in the Nick of time.” Oh, how he loved that phrase! It made him feel like he had some secret rule over the whole universe. He created dangers and then bottomed them out into amusements. He had villains, but they all secretly yearned to be heroes, and indeed turned into heroes at the slightest provocation. He loved making up stories for Robin, and she was enchanted. She would sit still and silent for hours, letting him transport her into his secret worlds.

Robin loved having her father home. If there was any problem at all for her, it had to do with her mother and not with him. With Nick around, Leslie suddenly seemed to stop seeing Robin. The kisses that were sometimes so rough that they made Robin feel wounded, the love nips and tickles and songs, all suddenly seemed to stop.

At first, Robin didn’t mind much. She was glad enough to spend all day in her room looking at the colored paper maps Nick brought her, tracing the blue lines he had drawn of his routes so she’d know where he went. But then, when she was tired and wanted her mother, when she felt like a hug, Leslie was preoccupied, cooking something strange for dinner, dressed in something she didn’t want Robin to wrinkle. Robin stood in the hall watching her, confused. Usually, all she had to do was just be in the house and Leslie would seek her out, pinpointing her location, finding her in seconds even when Robin was hiding. But now Robin had to stamp her feet or clap her hands just to get her mother to turn around and see her.

It was as if she had become invisible. She’d line up all her plastic animals across her mother’s side of the bed, but when Leslie came into the room, it was to spritz more perfume across the back of her neck, or run a comb through her hair. She stared dreamily past her. When she left the room, she casually ruffled Robin’s hair. “Look at my zoo,” Robin said, but Leslie was gone, and suddenly Robin didn’t feel like playing with her animals anymore. She cried, a little hurt, but Leslie had gone outside to get something from the car and didn’t hear her.

At dinner, Robin tried to talk, and then deliberately spilled her milk into a drippy white puddle on the cloth, but Leslie didn’t scold her the way she usually would. “Oh, Robin” was all she said, and then she mopped it up, telling Nick a story about one of her clients, her eyes dancing.

Leslie’s affection didn’t disappear—she never less than adored her daughter. But Robin was with her all the time. Nick’s presence was rarer, and she channeled all of her energy into charming him so that he might stay a day or two longer, so that when he was on the road, he might remember just how lovely it had been with her at home, and come back to her that much sooner.

Sometimes they took family vacations, usually at the shore. Robin would play outside the cottage, and when she came back in, Leslie and Nick would be sipping iced coffee at the table, bent toward each other, talking so quietly that Robin would suddenly shout. They both looked over at her then. “Well, what’s this?” Nick said, beckoning her to him, but Leslie told her to scoot and wash up for dinner. Leslie danced with Nick in the kitchen. She tucked Robin into bed and kissed her tenderly goodnight, but then she locked the bedroom door behind her and Nick so Robin couldn’t come in mornings.

Things changed almost as soon as Nick left for business again. Leslie got very quiet. She spent a day or so by herself in her sewing room, she fed Robin dinner and put her to bed, but it wasn’t until another day had passed that she suddenly seemed to see Robin again. And then she wouldn’t let her alone. She wanted to be with Robin all the time. She wanted to take Robin to the park, she wanted the two of them to bake cookies. She hugged and kissed Robin, she sang songs, but Robin, remembering how cool Leslie had been to her, how hurt and shut out she had felt, was wary. She expected every hug that Leslie gave her to suddenly stop; she couldn’t trust the stories or the kisses.

It always took Robin a while to warm to Leslie when Nick was gone, and Leslie told herself that was natural, that she just missed her father and it had nothing to do with her. Leslie worked to reclaim her daughter, praising her drawings, buying her blocks and paper dolls.

Robin, despite herself, would gradually creep into her mother’s lap when she felt blue. She crawled into bed with her when she heard strange noises, and sometimes she would throw her arms about Leslie for a hug. But even so, it somehow wasn’t enough for Leslie. There was always something in Robin that pulled away from Leslie before Leslie was ready to let her go. She’d be holding Robin and then she’d feel Robin start to pull away, and she would automatically tighten her grip, but Robin would always struggle free, always leave her. When Robin closed the door to her room, she didn’t like it when Leslie opened it again, and she was upset when Leslie followed her into the backyard, behind the shrubs.

“It was my secret place!” Robin complained.

“Well, now it’s ours,” Leslie said, but she noticed that Robin never went back there again.

Leslie told herself that it wasn’t just her. She had seen Robin with her friends, telling them in a serious adult voice that they had to go home because she wanted to play alone now. Leslie, watching the baffled faces of the other children, felt like inviting them in and making them brownies, felt like telling them, “I know how you feel.”

It made her angry sometimes. She was lonely. She missed Nick so much. She should have had at least the comfort of a loving daughter. When she saw Robin pulling away, she snapped at her, finding the soft spots that were easy to wound. Tugging a brush through Robin’s hair, she groaned, “Where did you get such a mop?” She said it couldn’t come from her or from Nick, that it was orphan hair, belonging to no one, and Robin, stung, snapped away from the brush.

It bothered Leslie, too, the way Robin pushed past her to rush to Nick when he came home. But then Nick would come up the walk, smiling at her, and sweep her so close to him that she could hear his heart, and then she’d see nothing, no one, but him, and it would be all right.

The first thing Robin wanted from Nick was the tapes he made for her. When he was on the road, he wrote scraps of stories on the back of his appointment book; pieces of plot found their way onto napkins in the places where he took his clients to dine. The writing relaxed him, made him feel bound to his daughter, and he felt this odd kind of happiness. He bought a portable tape recorder and began concocting stories in his hotel rooms, in the car as he drove the endless miles homeward. He thought she could listen to his voice now even when he was away. He’d never really leave her that way. Other men might bring their kids teddy bears or rubber balls, but Nick brought tapes, celluloid pieces of his heart.

Robin grew attached to the recorder, sitting in front of it, amazed and delighted and adoring. But sometimes she seemed to prefer the tape to Nick himself. He wasn’t so sure how he felt about that. He felt stupid going into her room and sitting with her, listening to his own voice, small and tinny in the recorder. He stood outside the door for a bit, feeling like a voyeur, thinking that when the tape was over he would stride in and tell her a fresh story himself. But then he heard the sudden whir and click of the rewind, and there was his voice again, telling the same story. Leslie, gliding past, pins in her mouth, frowned.

“It was my secret place!” Robin complained.

“Well, now it’s ours,” Leslie said, but she noticed that Robin never went back there again.

Robin grew up on ghosts. Every year Nick tracked her height, making a small pencil dot over her head on the kitchen wall, but there was no way of keeping track of his presence, no way of being sure where he was. She was in second grade and it still confused her, having her father’s voice there on the machine, or booming over the telephone wires at her, while all the time his body was somewhere else. Leslie inadvertently made it worse. She was trying to reassure Robin, who was crying, missing Nick. Leslie told her it wasn’t as if Nick were gone, because, really, he left parts of himself behind. No, not just in the machine. Why, if you shut your eyes, Leslie said, you could feel him right there in the room with you.

She meant it as a comfort, but Robin lay awake in her bed that night, tensed for her father, wondering what he would do when he came upon her, whether this presence would have a body like his or be like the monsters she sometimes saw lurking on TV. She got up and put on her best nightgown, the one with the pink and blue ducks. She tried to brush her hair, and she doused herself with the sweet-scented toilet water Leslie had given her. It was purple tinted, housed in a glass poodle she tilted along her neck.

She got back into bed and forced herself to stay awake, suddenly afraid, suddenly remembering spirits like Santa Claus, who knew if you were nice or naughty and who withheld gifts; or like God, who wrote down what you did for punishments to come. You couldn’t defend yourself against someone you couldn’t see. Robin bunched the covers about her head so that only her nose poked out. She shivered in her fear.

In the morning, she was sure she saw proof that Nick’s presence had been at work. A book was in the wrong place, and one of his flannel shirts had fallen into a pile from the hanger. She was afraid of his ghost, afraid she’d do something wrong and the ghost would leave and the real Nick would never come home. When Nick did arrive back, she was suspicious. She waited for him to tell her something bad she had done, and when he didn’t, she tried to relax.

She began thinking her father wasn’t the only ghost in the house. She was suddenly convinced that a wild and dangerous pack of wolves lived in the basement. She knew they were invisible; she knew they wore blue jeans and checked red shirts and walked upright on two legs and spat tobacco. And worse, she knew they had guns. When Leslie bounded downstairs to collect the wash, Robin lurked in the hallways, her heart racing. The few times she had to go down to the basement by herself, for her bike, or a doll, she made sure to carry handfuls of the hamburger meat Leslie had planned for her dinner, strips of bologna she was supposed to take to school for lunch. She scattered the meat in the corners, her peace offering. When the food drew mice, Robin said nothing. Traps were set, the mice were gone, but Robin knew that things had presence. She could go downstairs and still feel those mice, just as she still felt the wolves, just as she felt her father—there and always, just out of her grasp.

Nick’s schedule kept changing. A buyer would reschedule an appointment and he’d be home two days later than he had planned. A meeting would spill into the night, and rather than drive home when he was so exhausted, he would just stay over in a hotel. Robin didn’t really understand it. She only knew that he wasn’t home when he was supposed to be—that one moment there would be an extra place set for him at the dining-room table, there would be candles, and the next moment Leslie would be taking the plate away, removing the candles, and her face would be sad. Robin wasn’t sure what Nick did when he was away, although he had explained it to her. She only knew that he had said it was fun, and he always had stories about the wonderful places he visited. It suddenly began to worry her. If the places were so wonderful, what would keep him from staying there? What would make him come home at all?

Robin began getting depressed every time she saw Nick’s suitcase on the bed. “Oh, now, I’ll be back before you even know it,” he told her, but he whistled as he packed. He seemed to have more energy when he was leaving. It was those times he’d want to swoop her into the air, want to kiss and tickle her and sing her wild snatches of song. She’d walk by the living room and see him waltzing with Leslie, dipping her down so low, her hair brushed the rug.

Robin waited until Nick was in the bathroom, fiddling in the medicine cabinet for his aspirin and after-shave, and then she’d sneak something of hers into his suitcase. A sock, a blue hair ribbon, anything with her imprint on it so he’d remember her. Homing devices. And when he did come home, she felt grimly satisfied. He never said anything to her about her sock or her ribbon or her whatever that had traveled with him. He simply put them back in her room, and if she was there, he dotted her face with a kiss.

She didn’t trust the sound of his car in the morning anymore. She couldn’t be certain that this wasn’t one of his going-away days. She would dash to follow, the stones in the sidewalk ribbing her bare soles, her robe flapping open, her hair tumbling about her. When he spotted her, he slowed down, unlatching the front door for her to get in. She panted, unable to speak. He didn’t have to ask her what she thought she was doing. He simply waited for her to clutch back her breath and then he took out his appointment book and showed her all his Pittsburgh appointments for the whole week, that he wasn’t going to be out of town once. He watched her, and then he took the pen and wrote, with a flourish, “Tuesday, dinner with Robin.” He looped the car back toward the house where Leslie was wearily standing in the front yard. “Come on, Robin,” she said. She walked around to Nick’s side of the door and kissed him. “Can’t say I blame her,” Leslie said, smiling. Robin scowled and kicked at the bushes.

It made Nick a little crazy. He couldn’t get in the car without getting right out again to check behind the wheels, to look underneath and make sure Robin wasn’t crouched there. Once, he found her sleeping in the back seat. He kept hiding the car keys, but she always seemed to know where to find them.

He didn’t know what to do about her. She came home from school with drawings of her family, but sometimes his own face was missing. He remembered the trailer-court drawings with a pang; he remembered Dore’s laughter when she told him how Ruby’s kids had drawn their father in a skirt. He asked Robin why he wasn’t on the page, but she just shrugged. “You’re wherever it is you go,” she said.

Robin calmed down a little as she grew. Nick watched her, and by the time she was in fifth grade, she had stopped trailing the car, she didn’t put her ribbons into his suitcase as much, and for a while he thought the problem was over. But then, he and Leslie were called to Robin’s school for a conference. Robin was a smart little girl who brought home gold stars on almost all her papers, but Robin’s teacher, a thin young man with blond hair, told Nick that Robin had a problem with telling the truth. He said he had warned her and warned her about lying, but she persisted.

“What are you talking about?” said Nick. “Robin doesn’t lie.”

The teacher told him that Robin persisted in telling everyone that she was really an orphan and lived in a cardboard box under a bridge. Nick started. “Are things all right at home?” the teacher asked.

“Everything is fine,” Leslie said sharply. She wouldn’t discuss it. She told the teacher Robin had been blessed with a wild imagination, and as a teacher, why wasn’t he trying to cultivate such a gift instead of trying to break it down?

“I’ll talk to her,” Nick said, his voice low. When he stood up, the room seemed to move. Leslie was silent all the way to the car. She slid inside and leaned against her window.

He took up her hand and laid it against his cheek, and then she turned to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “I’m with her all the time,” she said. “You’re the one who’s always gone. You don’t see how she gets when you’re gone, how she pines.” She took her hand from him. “You don’t see how I get, either.” She sighed. “Can’t you work here in Pittsburgh? Do you dislike the city that much? Can’t you be plain old nine-to-five?”

Nick rested his head on the steering wheel. “I don’t know,” he said. He was silent for a moment, remembering what it was like to be in a hotel room, lying across a crumple of sheets, shaping his pillow as though it were Leslie against him, missing her so much it was sometimes like a disease eating away at him. He couldn’t tell her how things had changed; how when he was away, he convinced himself nothing could happen to them. When the phone rang in his hotel room, he never once thought it was the police wanting him to come identify some bodies. It was as if being away from his family was a weird kind of protection for them and for him. Home, he’d watch Leslie, worrying that she was ruining her eyes squinting over a sewing machine, uneasy when she didn’t come straight to bed but puttered around downstairs. It was at home that he thought to lean over and place a hand on her chest to make sure it still beat; at home that he felt the dangers lurking, waiting for opportunity.

Leslie moved closer to him, scooting across the seat. Her hair smelled piny. Last week it had smelled of vanilla. She was a fanatic about shampoos. She had fifteen or sixteen different plastic bottles lined up along the slippery edge of the tub. He never knew what her hair would smell like, and it was a surprise about her that he loved. He bent and kissed her hair, her neck, her face. “I love you,” he said, as if that were an answer.

He didn’t talk to Robin—he wasn’t sure what to say to her. For a while he simply watched her. She read a lot, so quickly she went through a book a day. He’d come home and find her in the backyard poring over a book. She read at dinner if he and Leslie let her; she was reading in her bed when he came to tuck her in. It never bothered him, but Leslie claimed it was too much escape. She yelled at Robin to get outside and play in the sun, and not to do it with a book, either. She told Nick that Robin’s teachers didn’t believe the level of books she read. They were too old for her, too demanding.

Nick didn’t mind. He had always brought her books from his job. Now he brought home selections from the adult lists, which she grabbed up and polished off in hours.

Once, he took a day off from work and showed up at her school. He told the principal there was a dire family emergency and he had to get Robin out of class. It wasn’t such a lie when he thought about it. The principal was about to wave a monitor over to fetch Robin when Nick interrupted. He wanted to know if it was possible for him to go to the class and get Robin himself. He said she was a nervous girl, that it would reassure her to see him right off. The principal said the best he could do was to allow Nick to go with the monitor, but Nick would still have to wait outside. “It’s just less disruptive,” the principal said. “You understand.”

Nick walked down the hall with a ten-year-old boy covered in freckles. The kid didn’t say one word to Nick, and refused to even look at him as he strode purposefully down the hall, swinging his arms as if he would strike anyone in his way. When they got to the class, he pivoted to Nick. “Wait here,” he said, in a voice so military that Nick felt like saluting. But he waited, and he peered through the glass ribbon along the door, and there was Robin, in the second row, her hair coming out of its braids, the ribbons undone, her dress rumpled. When she spotted him, he made a big production of waving so the other kids would see. Robin blinked. She got up and slowly came out with the monitor, and when the door opened, Nick waved at her teacher.

They didn’t say a word until after they had left the monitor, and then Robin squinted up at Nick, uncertain. “So how does lunch sound?” he said. “I thought you and I should have a whole day to ourselves.”

She seemed to switch on. She kept asking him was he really serious, were they really going someplace or was it just to the dentist? She didn’t calm down. Not when he took her for hot dogs, not during some silly kid movie about a talking typewriter that solved mysteries. He drove back toward the house. “Mind if I pick up your mother and we all have dinner?” he asked. She gave him a doubtful smile, but she said nothing.

He got Leslie. They went to a family-style place, with lots of red plastic baby chairs, a big messy salad bar with kids milling around, throwing lettuce at each other while waitresses gave them beleaguered smiles. He held Leslie’s hand, he winked at Robin. He kept looking at all the other families, grinning, letting them grin back, telling himself that he fit into a place like this just as well as anybody else; that anyone here could take one look at the three of them and not think anything was a bit out of place.

He told himself that from now on he was going to take Robin with him someplace one day each month. He had plans. He got tickets for the aquarium; he brought home tennis rackets and reserved court space, telling Robin to think how surprised her granny would be to hear she was playing.

But then, suddenly, the earth seemed to spit up its dangers. Nothing was as easy as that first day alone with her when he took her out of school. He’d be on the court and he’d lob a ball and it would strike her, just in the soft of her belly, but it would unnerve him so much, he’d tell her that daddy didn’t feel well, and he’d take her home to Leslie; then he’d get in the car and drive down to Point State Park and sit by the fountain. He’d try again, taking her to a movie, but the kids in front would act up, shooting rubber bands, and he couldn’t help it, he’d think, There goes her eye, and he’d make Robin get up and leave with him.

He knew he was probably making her crazy, stopping and starting like that, but he never stopped asking her to go places, and although he usually didn’t carry through his plans, she always agreed to go with him; she seemed to look forward to it.

He ran, his old trailer-court habit, to calm himself down. He bought himself new black sweats, expensive running shoes, and a stopwatch so he could time himself. It did calm him. He looked forward to the running, until one night he heard one of the neighborhood dogs barking, and he turned, and there, behind him, struggling to keep up was Robin. He was startled and angry, and then he saw the panic in her face, the sweat beaded on her brow as she panted to reach him, and he stopped. He waited for her to catch up.

“Where are you going?” she gasped. She had a stitch in one side, she said she felt like throwing up, and he walked the rest of the way home with her, his legs achy, yearning to break free and run.