NINE

As they got older, things began changing between Mandy and Robin. In ninth grade, when they were both fourteen, Mandy suddenly began wearing makeup, layering on frosted blusher and green eyeshadow. She clipped her hair into elaborate styles and fooled with long, sparkling earrings that her mother was always telling her were going to ruin her earlobes. She had a boyfriend who drove a yellow Camaro, who wanted everyone to call him Head. After the skis, Mandy claimed, and also because he had such a big head, made even larger by a bushy corona of hair. Sometimes, though, Mandy confided that the name was because of the things he did to her, the things he liked done to him.

“I’m not calling him Head,” Robin said. But it didn’t really matter what she called him, because he ignored her. When she spoke to him, he looked at Mandy. When she touched his wrist to get his attention, he put his own hand on Mandy’s thigh. Robin went over to Mandy’s less and less. Jake was as friendly to Head as he was to her; Evie as mothering. Mandy wouldn’t make any plans with Robin until she had checked to see what Head wanted to do, and what Head wanted usually involved a dark place and something for two.

Robin didn’t have any other close friends, and she didn’t like coming right home from school. Leslie trailed her, wanting her to go shopping, to come take a walk with her. She was always asking questions, always prying, and sometimes she would go into sudden heated rages, yelling at Robin about the dust under her bed, about the dental bill caused by all the candy wrappers she found in Robin’s pockets. When the phone rang and it was Nick, Leslie would grab the phone from her, curling her back, suddenly acting as if there were no one else around.

There’s no place on earth for me, Robin thought. She was always trying to escape from Leslie’s smothering attention, always trying to make her father like her. She didn’t know what it was she had done, but she knew she must have done something to make him so distant. He had stopped telling her stories, making her tapes, a long time ago, and when she tried to play the tapes now, it just ended up making her feel blue. Sometimes at night, when he was sitting outside, looking at the sky, she’d feel a little lonely and go out and sit beside him. His whole body seemed to tense up. He made small talk with her for a while, and then kissed her cheek and went back inside, and it all made her feel more alone than she had felt before she came out to be with him.

Whom could she live with? She had no relatives except an arthritic grandmother and a grandfather, who lived out in the desert, called twice a year, and never could manage to visit. They were very old now. Robin knew Leslie worried about her parents because when they died, she’d be as orphaned as Nick was. Robin didn’t know them that well, although she did remember a few visits when she was younger. She remembered her grandmother carefully telling her the whole story of her birth, reminding her that she was protected, a child of danger.

Robin had once asked Leslie about it, and Leslie had told her she was much too smart a girl to believe in any superstition like that. But Robin did anyway—it comforted her. She tried to strengthen what power she was supposed to have. She made herself a beaded leather bracelet and blessed it herself so it might act as an amulet, a reminder that she was special. She told herself that if her life was different from anyone else’s, if it was more lonely, then maybe it was supposed to be; maybe it was just part of the price you had to pay for being really unique.

She didn’t make any new girlfriends, but suddenly, there were boys. She was attracted to the ones who didn’t fit in, the wilder boys who wore black leather jackets even when it was ninety degrees outside, the boys who didn’t even go to the regular high school but attended the vocational school just in back. Everyone said it was because they were too stupid to make it in regular school, that they were all outcasts who couldn’t even cut it in the remedial program.

Robin didn’t think that. She was curious about them. They learned trades: They could take apart a car and put it back together so it ran as good as new; they could wire a whole house if they liked. She felt drawn to these outcasts; she liked the way they carried their label defiantly, proud. There were only a few girls in the program, but there were stories about them, too. They carried nail files to fight with, or orange sticks that they rubbed against the sidewalk into points. The boys didn’t have to carry anything at all.

Robin, protected, walked past the vocational school every day on her way to class. The weather was warm now, and the mechanic students were working on a car outside. Her coltish legs shone under her short skirt, her red hair caught and tumbled the light. Some mornings she felt bold. She’d go right up to a boy she thought looked interesting and start talking to him. She’d ask him about the car, about what he was doing. She even leaned under the hood to look. The boy was always so startled that a girl from the regular school would talk to him with something other than disdain that he almost always fell in love.

She saw the vocational boys after school—for walks, for a Coke and a piece of pie at Jerry’s Sweet Shop. At first there was no one special. She saw two different boys in one week, or sometimes one particular boy for a week straight until someone else caught her eye. She wrote name after name in her books, and some in the palm of her hand so she could close her fingers around them and keep them hidden. She never slept with any of the boys, although she was certainly pressured, and although almost all the kids assumed that she did. Mandy, passing her in the hall one day, stopped her and told her that she was getting herself good and talked about, and that Head had even stood up for her.

“You can’t just hang all over guys,” Mandy said. “You got to be a little cool about it.”

“What do you know?” Robin said. She didn’t tell Mandy that the reason she hung on to the boys so much was because she was sure if she didn’t, they would float away from her; that having boy after boy lessened the chance that she’d be alone.

The boys left her, of course. They were always leaving her, just when she’d convinced herself she loved them. When they started getting twitchy, turning back to the girls they knew would part their legs for them, Robin concentrated her energies. She wrote desperate prayers into a journal to her grandmother, to the guardian angel she was sure she had. Please, please, let Ron come see me at lunch and apologize. Please, please, let Timmy smile. And when a boy did what she had prayed, she felt protected again, she felt strong.

Robin never told Leslie about her boys. She was the one to call them, keeping her conversations clean of names or details. She was the one to go to their houses, their meeting spots. And then, there was one boy who stuck around longer than the rest, one boy Robin really, really liked, and for him, she opened her life up a little—she took him to her home.

His name was Rick. He was sixteen, with dirty-blond hair, one side shaved close against his skull. He wore battered brown work shoes with steel toes he claimed were for fighting and not for protection like the auto-body manual said. He had a reputation. The other kids stayed clear of him. He was said to have put his own father in the hospital because he had caught him beating up his mother one day. He was said to have been suspended from the regular high school for slicing up a student who had pulled a gun on him. But he didn’t seem dangerous to Robin. If he fought, he fought for principles, it seemed to her. Every time she saw him, he was quietly tinkering with a car in the parking lot. He would look up and see her, give her a dazed, sleepy smile. He talked to her more and more. He began walking her to class, walking her home, talking to her about small engines, about spark plugs and motorbikes.

He was protective about her. He didn’t seem to mind that she wouldn’t sleep with him, and he never pretended that she did, not even to the other vokies who had gone out with her, the ones who had never managed to even unbutton her blouse. He told Robin she was a refreshing change from the girls he was used to, that it underlined how different she was from everyone. “Yeah, different,” Robin said. He held her hands; he told her he’d wait for her to make whatever moves she wanted. “You’re a loner, just like me. You make your own rules,” he said.

He talked to her about cars. He told her he could match up any person in the world with a car.

“What matches me?” Robin asked.

He squinted over at her. “Oh, a nice little VW, something compact that whips around, that lets you know you’re never in control.” Robin smiled; she pulled on his hand.

He was sensitive about not being smart enough for her. He saw all the books she stashed in her purse, saw that she was always reading when he came to pick her up at the drugstore after school. She read in the coffee shop when he went to the can. She read walking down the street, for Christ’s sake, dodging people, so skilled she didn’t even have to lift her nose up. He brought her paperback editions of Kafka stories he had underlined and made comments in. Most of the comments he lifted from the Cliffs Notes he bought for himself. He memorized bits so he could say something intelligent to her, and when he couldn’t remember, he lied. He told her that Faulkner had loved cars and was almost a mechanic. He told her that Fitzgerald rode a Harley. He was very polite with her, very solicitous.

Robin adored him. She never told him, but she really couldn’t have cared less whether he read anything at all. She didn’t care if he knew the difference between Kafka and comics. When he talked that way, she just let her attention glaze over; she concentrated on the shape of his hand, the bark of his neck. She liked it best when he talked about the two of them together—about the body shop they could run, the house they could live in, filled with dogs and cats and music. And she loved it best when he was just staring at her as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune, as if he would never leave her, no matter what she did, no matter how she was. “Say it,” she commanded. “Tell me again.” She swooned on his words. He loves me, she thought.

The first time Leslie saw Rick, he was coming up the walk holding her baby’s hand and blowing smoke rings. She stopped sewing and strode out onto the front walk, her hair unraveling from its topknot, her blue dress streaky with tailor’s chalk. He dropped Robin’s hand, but he didn’t put out the cigarette; he kept insolently drawing on it, and he let his eyes slide over Leslie. Leslie noticed the tight fit of his jeans, the shirt he had half unbuttoned, the threatening stance of his boots. Rick kept one hand in his pocket, but he answered Leslie’s questions so politely, he almost made her like him a little. But then, he started talking about the vocational school, and when it was time to go, he just jerked Robin to him, tumbling her off-balance, kissing her as if he didn’t even see Leslie standing in the sun. When he strode off, he was humming something low and dangerous in his throat.

In the house, Leslie told Robin she didn’t like him. “A girl as smart as you can find someone better.”

“I have Rick, I don’t need anyone.”

“You’re not seeing him,” said Leslie.

“I am,” said Robin, her mouth tight.

When Nick came home, the house was quiet. He found Robin in the backyard, in a green dress he hadn’t seen before. “You look pretty,” he said, and then he saw how red her eyes were. “What is it?” he asked, alarmed.

“Nothing,” she said helplessly, and then burst into tears.

“Ah,” he said, “that explains everything.”

He sat down beside her. The only time he could remember really talking to her was when she was just a baby, when he’d liked to whisper his secrets into her crib and just imagine her response; or when he talked to her through his stories, the way he still did—only now she didn’t listen, she didn’t hear him.

“I hate this,” Robin said abruptly, plucking at tufts of grass.

“Hate what?”

She looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know.…Love,” she said.

Nick leaned his back against the stiff, gnarly bark of the willow. Love. She was in love. He wanted to take her inside, and as soon as they stepped through the door, he wanted her to be five years old again, with a flurry of uncombable curls; he wanted her to be a baby he could rock in his arms and breathe over as she slept so her breathing would match his. He washed one hand over his face.

“What’s the matter,” she asked. “Are you mad at me?”

“I was just remembering,” he said.

“Was Mom your first love?” Robin asked and suddenly Nick felt himself spiraling back, to a long white corridor, a long, pale blonde, blind-man’s-bluffing her way along the wall, catching him so he couldn’t move, so he couldn’t do a single thing but pin himself in place and wait for her to release him.

“It was a long time ago,” he said.

“Really? You loved someone else?” She was charmed, she wanted him to tell her about it; but he just shook his head—he said they were talking about Robin right now, and not him.

She seemed loosened up. She started hesitantly telling him about this boy she was seeing, about how he made her feel, how confusing it all was.

The more details she unfolded, the more uneasy Nick became, until he suddenly stopped her speech. “Listen,” he said, “you’re only fourteen.”

“How old were you?” she asked.

“I don’t think I want you seeing this boy,” he said. She snapped up, like a door slamming. She strode across the grass, around to the side of the house, leaving him alone in the back. Where she had been sitting, the grass was pressed down, still warm, and he placed his hand on it for a minute before he, too, got up.

When Leslie came home, exhausted, he wanted to talk to her about the boy. He told her he had asked Robin not to see him, and when Leslie heard that, she flung her arms about him. “You did?” she said, smiling. He held her, he kissed her neck, and upstairs he heard Robin’s angry silence, and it made him hug Leslie tighter.

Rick was used to parents not liking him, used to sneaking around. He knew how to orchestrate meetings with Robin—after school at the coffee shop, early morning before school started, weekends when she was supposed to baby-sit. It could all be worked out, but what he couldn’t get used to was the way Robin was reacting. She cried without reason. They’d be having a perfectly good time just swinging on the ropes by the old school, and then she’d dip her head, and the next thing he knew, her eyes were a blur of tears.

She was difficult to comfort. He bought her ice cream and windup toys; he skipped classes just so he could eat lunch with her. “What do you care what your parents say?” He smoothed her hair. “What do they matter?”

He made himself angrier and angrier by scratching away at the situation like it was a rash he couldn’t cure. He told Robin that his father used to be that way, trying to run everyone’s life, and then there had been this thing that happened to him, and after that, things had changed—his father acted like a decent human being now.

“What thing?” Robin asked. She had heard the story whispered in school, but she wanted Rick to tell it to her, wanted to hear his version.

He shrugged. He told her that what had happened didn’t matter; what counted was how his father had changed. “We all get along now,” he told her. He kicked at a stone, making furrows in the dirt. He held her hand. “I don’t like anyone making you sad,” he said. “This has got to stop.”

Robin, looking up, thought he meant her crying, and it made her tense.

At home, Robin moped. Nick tried to talk with her before he went on the road, but she was curt with him; she nodded and kept her eyes glassy and unreadable. The whole drive out, he kept her photo up against the dash. He tried to imagine her rushing off to a movie with a girlfriend, trying on a skirt in some brightly lit department store—anything, everything, but Robin sleepily wrapped up in the arms of that boy, making her body a secret for him to discover.

Leslie couldn’t escape as easily. Her daughter was home with her, an open wound she couldn’t get near enough to heal. Robin pushed out of the house. She said she was going to the library, but when she came back home, her hands were empty of books and she was flushed. She said she was going to study at a friend’s. She took her math book, she even left the phone number where she was going to be, and sometimes, hating herself, Leslie would call on the pretense of offering to come pick Robin up. No matter when she called, Robin was always in the bathroom or had just left—there was always some reason why she couldn’t come to the phone. And when Robin got home, she’d walk by Leslie without explanation. “Do you think I’m a fool?” Leslie cried. “Don’t you think I know where you’ve been?”

“I’ve been at Debra’s,” Robin said.

Leslie didn’t know what to do. Robin looked terrible. She wasn’t sleeping nights. Leslie heard her walking around, making tea, eating cookies. In the morning the kitchen would be seeded with crumbs, and Robin had circles under her eyes.

One afternoon she simply forbade Robin to go to the library, but Robin stormed past her, breaking the glass in the front door, stepping over the pieces in her defiant hurry to get out. Leslie jumped into the car and tried to follow her. She didn’t care if someone broke into the house and took everything. She drove up and down all the streets she thought Robin might travel, but her daughter seemed to have disappeared. She drove for over an hour. She tried and tried to dredge up that boy’s last name so she could at least call Information from a pay phone and try to get his address. She could drive out to his house and confront him. She could confront his mother; the two of them could stand out on the front porch and wait for him to swagger home. He’d have Robin’s scent on his clothes, in his pores; Leslie would have to place her two hands about his neck and squeeze just to free her.

Leslie kept traveling the same routes, over and over, until on one street a woman in blue curlers and red stretch pants stepped right in front of Leslie’s car and flagged it down. Leslie stopped, bewildered, and rolled down her window.

“Are you lost?” the woman asked. “You sure do look it.”

“No, I … I’m just looking for my daughter,” Leslie said. Her voice foundered; she felt the woman’s palpable interest.

“Not many kids come by this block,” the woman finally said. “You’d better try Moran Road, just that way.” She pointed. “That’s where they cause their trouble.”

Leslie continued to drive until the streetlights set a dreamy film of light dappling against the sky. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was 9:30, and that for the first time in her entire life she had missed a fitting. Grace Thomas. She had a temper, too.

The lights were all off when she got home. She parked the car in the front instead of putting it in the garage, in case she had to go out searching for Robin again. She stayed in the car for a moment, her head resting against the steering wheel, and then, wearily, she went into the house. When she clicked on the light, she saw Robin, sleeping on the couch. Leslie was so grateful to see her that she turned off the light and simply sat there in the darkness, watching her. She kept wondering what she could do to make Robin happy, to make Robin at least like her a little. After a bit, she slept herself, but she kept waking—she heard things rustling outside, noises. She blinked in the dark until she could make Robin out again, Robin, who was sleeping as if there were nothing simpler in the world. Gradually the noises faded, and Leslie slowed down into sleep, deep and dreamless.

The next day was Saturday. Neither of them mentioned the night, not even when Nick called, insisting on speaking to Robin. Leslie couldn’t tell what he was saying, only that Robin kept saying yes.

All morning they were careful about each other. Leslie waited around for the glass man, and Robin made no attempt to go anywhere, not even outside, but took a paperback novel and sat in the kitchen reading. She hadn’t even tried to call up that boy on the phone, hadn’t once glanced out the window the way she usually did, with eyes focused so far beyond what Leslie could see that Leslie would never be able to follow.

Leslie decided to do something. When the glass was in, she got the car keys and came into the kitchen and abruptly asked Robin if she’d like to learn to drive. “Just in the schoolyard,” Leslie said. She thought driving was an adult thing, a symbol of her trust.

Robin looked at Leslie in amazement. “I can’t even take driver’s ed yet,” Robin said.

“It’s fine,” Leslie said. “I’ll be right beside you. It’ll be my worry, not yours.” She jangled the keys. “It’ll be our secret.”

Robin hesitated for a moment and then got up. “Deal,” she said.

Leslie drove them to the old schoolyard. No one would be there. Robin could drive around and around, practice parking and turns. The car pulled a little, and Leslie swore, pumping the gas, turning to smile at Robin to show her the curse had nothing to do with her. She remembered her own driving lessons. Lord. Her father shouting and cursing as she backed into a bus. He had humiliated her by making her get out of the car, right in the middle of the road, while he did the maneuver himself, all the time still yelling at her from his window, drawing everyone’s eyes right to her. She had never wanted to drive after that, and she had refused to get into a car with him. She had taken driver’s ed at school only because she could get a credit for it, and because the instructor was also her math teacher, who always liked her because she got straight A’s.

“Okay, you take the wheel,” Leslie said. She stopped the car in the middle of the schoolyard. It pulled again, but she figured it was probably due for a tune-up. She scooted across and let Robin take the wheel. “Easy now,” she said.

Robin was a slow and deliberate driver. Leslie kept telling her how great she was doing, partly because every time she said so, Robin turned and smiled. Teaching Robin also gave Leslie excuses to touch her. She put one hand on Robin’s to help her turn; she sometimes had to touch Robin’s leg to remind her to brake; and never once—oh, the miracle of it—did Robin move from her. She just glanced at Leslie and laughed.

They must have been out there only about a half-hour when the accident happened. Robin was driving down a long slope when suddenly the brakes failed. She couldn’t move, she panicked, and Leslie crunched her own foot down on Robin’s to pump the brakes. When that didn’t work, she tried to reach the emergency brake, but it was all the way over on the left. The car wasn’t going that fast, and the road was lined with grass, so Leslie opened Robin’s door and roughly shoved her out. Then she jerked the wheel all the way to the right and tumbled herself out of the car.

The car dented against a tree. Nobody was hurt. Leslie’s jeans were ripped at the knees; Robin had one long scratch running across her cheek. Leslie, startled by Robin’s crumpled shoulders, put her arm about her and rocked her a little. “It’s not your fault,” she said. She pulled her up and led her back to the road, brushing off the back of her sweater, which was seeded with dry, dying leaves. They disintegrated the moment she touched them. “Come on,” Leslie said. “We’ll go call a tow truck.”

It didn’t take the mechanic very long to figure out that the car had been tampered with. When he came out to talk to Leslie, wiping his greasy hands along a spanking-white jumpsuit, Leslie was sure he was about to scold her for not taking regular care of her car. Instead, he kept watching her, studying her curiously as if he couldn’t quite believe a young suburban wife would have this much menace in her life. He told her how lucky she was that she hadn’t been on the highway and hadn’t been driving fast. And then he told her what an expert job had been done on her brakes. He said he couldn’t remember seeing anything like this, and if he were her, he wouldn’t do any driving for a while; he would watch himself.

“Tampered? What are you talking about?” Leslie said. She wouldn’t believe him; she thought he was just some stupid kid—what did he know? She left the car there and took a cab home, but during the whole ride back, she felt vaguely uneasy. She kept thinking about that one night when she had left the car out in front of the house; she kept remembering the noises. And then a sudden queasy intuition made her straighten up, so violently that the cabbie twisted around to ask if she was all right, if she wanted him to pull over so she could catch her breath.

Robin, lying on her back in the grass beside Rick, holding his hand, was telling him the accident story, embellishing it so it seemed she had practically died. She made him trace the scratch on her face; she added bruises and cuts she now claimed had miraculously faded; she made up a visit to the emergency room, a ride in an ambulance. She thought he’d pamper her silly. Instead, he unlaced his fingers from hers and sat up, stitching his brow. When he stood up, she pulled him down, but he wouldn’t look at her. “You sorry I’m alive?” she asked. She was only kidding, but he jerked toward her, his eyes aflame.

He didn’t make sense. He started talking about how he wanted to live in the country, how even Pittsburgh, dinky as it was, was too much of a town for him. He wanted to be somewhere surrounded by silence, where all you saw in the distance was one red light blinking out civilization, and even then it would be too far away to touch you. He’d have cars to work on, maybe a small shop with a few customers he knew.

“Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” Robin asked. “I nearly died.”

She told him how great her mother had been about it, how they had both agreed not to tell her father, because anything like that would set him off for weeks. “You wait,” she said to Rick. “I bet she has you over for dinner soon.” She nestled up against him. “God, I love you,” she said.

He twisted her to face him. “Listen,” he said, “when people love each other, they can tell each other anything, right? They can forgive.”

She blinked at him. “You want to tell me what’s going on with you?” she said.

“You’re like a volcano in my blood,” he said, and she giggled until she saw his face; then she felt the breath rush out of her. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You haven’t been with anyone else, you don’t know what it’s like for someone like me to love someone like you, what it’s like not sleeping with you because I don’t want you thinking that’s the only reason I’m with you. I’m the one that’s doing the waiting, that’s making the sacrifices—I’m the one who knows just what it is I’m missing out on.”

He got up; he stormed in place. “Sometimes, in the night, you know, all that wanting just wakes me up. I feel like I’m burning alive. I have to go to the kitchen and chip ice out of the freezer and swallow it just to cool down. It never helps.”

He said sometimes he tried to call her, even though it was late, and then her mother’s voice, so hard, so cold, made him so angry, he’d just hang up on her. He said he knew her father didn’t have any use for him either. He had never even met him, but fathers were always funny about their daughters.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “But it seemed so crazy. I mean, here we were, loving each other and not being able to be together when all the time we’ve been—I don’t know—innocent.” He licked at his lips.

“At first, I was just going to go over to the house, trickle stones at your window, and get you to come out with me for an hour. I didn’t though,” he said. “I didn’t even tell you how I was suffering, because I didn’t want you thinking I was weak, a pussy.”

“You should have told me,” Robin whispered to him, but he didn’t hear her, he was riding on his story.

“And then, that day you came to see me, crying about the broken door, about your mother—you remember that?”

Robin nodded. He had bought her a Coke and told her everything was going to be fine. He had kissed both her eyes. One, then the other, so gently, she could feel his lashes dust her skin. He had made her go home, had told her they would have to be sly and bide their time.

“I came to talk to your mother, to have it out,” he said. “The car was in front.”

Robin sat up.

“I was going to go to the door, I was going to, but then I kept hearing in my mind just how it would go, I kept thinking what a waste it would be—she’d be more angry at me than before. It made me so mad I couldn’t see straight. I decided to go home, cool off, and then think what to do, but by the time I got home, I was even madder. I kept thinking about your mother, keeping you from me, making you break the goddamned front door just because you were trying to get to me—to me—and the next thing I was doing was getting some tools, going back to the car—”

“Stop!” said Robin. “Don’t tell me another word!”

She stood up, backing away from him a little, but he snatched up her left hand and pulled her toward him. “Listen, I had to do it,” he told her. “What other way did I have? I didn’t do it to hurt anyone. I just thought—well, a little scare. That’s what I thought. Like leaving my calling card.”

Robin pulled away from him. She didn’t think she could think straight anymore; she didn’t think she could breathe or eat or do anything ever again. “I was in that car,” she said. “I was driving.”

“Don’t tell me that!” he cried. “I can’t hear that!”

“I was driving!”

“Do you want to make me crazy? I’d die before I’d hurt you. Do you want me to slit my throat with my knife?” He dug in his pocket and pulled out his knife. Robin knocked it from his hand. “Did I make you hang out with my friends? Did I make you sleep with me? Did I ever hit you?”

“That was my mother,” Robin said. “Who told you that wouldn’t hurt me? Who told you I wanted her hurt or scared or anything?” She couldn’t look at Rick anymore. He hurt her eyes. “Get away from me,” she said, her voice snagging in her throat. “Just get away. Don’t you look at me or talk to me or even think about me anymore. You hear me? I don’t even want you having me in your daydreams.”

She started walking away, and he followed, desperate, not speaking, trying to get her to just look at him. He touched her arm, her leg, but with each touch, she flinched as if burned.

“You told me” he said, “what a suffocating bitch she was, that you hated her. You said she never left you alone.”

“You don’t know anything,” Robin said.

“Yes I do. I know you.”

“Get away from me.” She flailed one arm wildly at him, the way she might shoo an animal. “We’re separate. I don’t want to see you.”

She had never seen him cry before. She had never seen any boy cry, really, and when she saw his tears, something caught inside of her. She thought how easy it would be to touch him, but she forced herself to keep walking, even after she sensed he had stopped following.

“You’ll call me!” he shouted. “You’re the one who’ll come begging and then we’ll see whose turn it is to shut off, we’ll see who sends who away!” When Robin didn’t speak, he shouted again. “Who likes you? Who ever liked a stupid twat like you?”

She shut her eyes and kept walking, blinded. It wasn’t fair, having to choose her mother against him. It wasn’t fair that he would do something she could never explain to herself. For a moment she wished herself back in the belly of the car, back to the moment when the brakes failed. She willed it to speed, to hurtle recklessly down a twisting, turning highway, gaining on the raw, broken side of a mountain. The crash, when it came, would be nothing more than a blinking away of her life, a clean erasure of all the memory she was now going to have to bear.

For a while, it brought her closer to Leslie. She thought it was her own guilty efforts—her staying at home, her hesitant help at dinner. Instead of reading in her room, she’d venture out into the living room where Leslie was stitching facings. She’d plop herself down on a nearby chair and crack open her book. She felt protective of her mother. She didn’t sleep nights for a while, just waiting for something to happen. She wasn’t afraid for herself. She saw Rick lingering around the high school, but now when he saw her, he scowled and made a big production out of turning his back to her. Sometimes she’d come out of school and see him with his arm about another girl, but she still felt his eyes trailing her and she knew that the other girl might just as well have been a newspaper for all the attention and desire he was showing her.

She never discussed the accident with Leslie, and she certainly never told Nick. Leslie had filed a report with the police, but later she insisted that the mechanic had been wrong, that there had simply been a problem with the car, and anyway, it was fine now, so what was the problem? She never told Robin how easily she had managed to put the pieces together.

She went into Robin’s room one day while Robin was at school and prowled guiltily through her papers until she scavenged his last name. There it was. Pruitt. Like spit, she thought. She went to the phone book and carefully traced down his address with her finger. She knew from Robin that he liked to hang out in his driveway, tinkering with an old car.

She waited until one afternoon when Robin was at the dentist. She wasn’t going to do much. She was going to threaten him, tell him she’d see him in juvenile court if he so much as called Robin again. And if he wasn’t there, she’d ring the bell and talk to his parents, or she’d sit out on the porch and wait for him.

When she turned into his street, she saw him, there in the driveway, swabbing down an old green car with a red rag. He stiffened when he saw her, but Leslie parked, got out, and strode toward him.

He denied everything, of course. He even had the balls to threaten her right back, to accuse her of defamation of character and tell her she’d be good and sorry if she didn’t shut up. When she remained unfazed, he threatened to beat her up.

“Ha!” said Leslie. “You beat me up. Ha!” She was secretly terrified. She could feel the quick thrill of fear; the air seemed charged. “You stay the hell away from my daughter. You come near her and I swear I’ll kill you myself.”

“Your daughter,” he snorted. “Who wants your daughter!” His eyes turned hard and glassy, and then, to Leslie’s shock, he started crying. He was furious with himself. He kept trying to twist away from her so she wouldn’t see his face. She was half expecting him to tell her some story about allergies, but he just kept repeating that no one in his right mind would want anything to do with Robin. “Like mother, like daughter,” he spat out, and Leslie felt another quick snap of surprise, realizing that Robin must have gotten to Rick first.

She was so touched, so amazed, it made her suddenly gentle. “It’s all right,” she said out loud, half to Rick, half to herself. “It’s going to be all right.”

“Get out,” he said.

She turned and walked back to the car. She drove home half in a dream, and when she came into the living room, Robin was there, reading one of Leslie’s novels. Leslie didn’t say anything, just walked over and rested one hand against her daughter’s hair for a moment, until Robin touched her hand, and then she went upstairs to sew.