ELEVEN

Robin began buying her books at the Squirrel Hill Bookmart. Every time she wandered in, she looked around for Bill, and every time he saw her, he always had some new story about her life to relate back to her. He showed her off to the clerks, asked her opinions about displays, and sometimes, too, he talked about Nick. He told her stories he thought she already knew—about Nick having to share a room with a drunkard at the “Y” in Philadelphia because of a hotel strike; about Nick riding and riding the swan boats in Boston, a grown man charming a gaggle of little kids. He told her how much Nick loved Boston, and asked her if she felt the same way. Robin was ashamed to admit she had never been there. “Sure,” she said. “It’s a great city.” He sent her home with an armful of new books and regards to “that father of yours.”

At home, she was restless. When Nick came home that evening, she asked him abruptly if he would take her to Boston sometimes.

“Boston? Why Boston?”

“I’d like to see it,” she said. “Maybe I’ll want to go to college there.”

“It’s just a city,” Nick said, but Dore flickered along his mind.

“It is not,” she said. “You’re smiling.”

He sighed. “Why all this sudden interest?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I want to go someplace new. Maybe I want to be with you. Just me and you.”

He looked at her. “Listen, you wouldn’t have a good time there. It’s dull and it’s dirty.” He scratched at his face. “It’s about time for all of us to take a vacation. Maybe we could all go to Philadelphia for a long weekend soon. What about that?”

“Sure,” she said, turning.

It really bothered her that Nick wouldn’t take her. She didn’t ask him about it again, but she trailed him aimlessly about the house, a shadow, until finally he turned around and gave her another reason why he couldn’t take her to Boston, why she wouldn’t like it. “I didn’t even ask you,” she said. He looked discomfited. “Well, you didn’t have to,” he said.

Less than a month later, he left for Boston. She knew what time he was leaving in the morning, and she set her alarm to rouse her, but when it shocked her awake and she woozily peered out her window into the dim morning light, she saw that he was already settled in his car, the motor already running. And then, before she could rush into her robe and slippers, before she could shout out the window for him to wait, he was gone.

All that week, things angered her. When she tried to comb her hair, the teeth caught in the tangles and broke off in her hand. When she put on mascara, the brush poked her in the eye. She wouldn’t get on the phone when Nick called, and then later, when she changed her mind and called him herself, he was always out.

Leslie always took on more work when Nick was gone, coming home later with her hands full of rustling silks and textured cottons. At night, though, she liked having Robin in the house with her. She bought ice cream, she made popcorn—she’d do anything to have Robin keep her company. She kept the good TV in her bedroom, so when they both sat up watching old movies, there was always the possibility that Robin would fall asleep in bed with her, that she could quietly shut the set off and cover Robin, that she could wake in the night and have a body next to her.

On Saturday morning, the day before Nick was due back, Leslie told Robin that he had called to say he was going to be another few days. Leslie was at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, a bottle of aspirin spilled out in front of her. When she looked at Robin, she frowned.

“Did he say how come?” Robin asked.

Leslie shrugged. “And where are you going?”

“To the library,” Robin said. “Swimming maybe.”

“Dinner’s at six,” Leslie said.”

I’ll probably just get a hamburger in town.”

Leslie put her cup down, stroking her brow. “You just be here at six, please.”

Something prickled along Robin’s spine. She heard Leslie telling her again about dinner, about getting home early and helping around the house, and then she turned and went out the door, into the blissful cool of the morning.

She didn’t realize she was going to Boston until five that evening. She couldn’t stop thinking about her father, about Leslie waiting at home for her. It was a weekend. If she left now, she could be there a whole day before she had to come back. She could call him to say she was coming; she could get him to call Leslie for her. She fiddled in her jeans for some change, and then, thinking better of it, stood up and began collecting her things. She’d take care of it when she got there. Leslie wasn’t expecting her for another hour, and Nick…well, Nick wasn’t expecting her at all.

It would take Robin fifteen hours to get to Boston. She was wary hitching out of Pittsburgh. She kept trying to squint into oncoming cars before she jammed her thumb out, making sure she didn’t recognize a client of Leslie’s, a friend of her father’s, or anyone who might know her. Whenever she saw a car that looked vaguely familiar, she tucked her head down and hunched around from the road, as if the wind were too fierce for her.

She had never hitched before and she had a feeling that maybe she wasn’t doing it right. She tried to keep her stance loose and confident and tough, and she tried to look so pretty, a driver couldn’t help but slow down. Once, when she was still going with Rick, when they were eating lunch behind the vocational school, she had overheard some of the vocational girls talking about hitching, idly discussing what they would and wouldn’t do. You wouldn’t get into a car with more than one guy; you had to check for door handles on the insides before you got in; and it was a good idea to lean in just enough to sniff out any alcohol scenting the air. No old cars; no real new cars, either, because that could mean someone so rich they might feel they could do whatever they wanted. Matronly women were good; girls your own age; truck drivers, who could be counted on not only to be polite but to buy you dinner at a truck stop. The girls had told a few horror stories, but Robin discarded those now; she still thought nothing bad could ever happen to her.

A car whizzed by her, slowed for a moment, and she saw a red glove suddenly poke out the window and beckon to her. She raced toward it, but just as she got to the door, just as she was about to peer in, the car suddenly jolted ahead, speeding, leaving her standing in the road, her hand outstretched.

Her first ride was from a middle-aged man in a green suit. There were handles on all the doors, he smelled only of lime aftershave, and for the whole two hours he drove without once touching her. He sneaked anxious peaks at her, though, and when he spoke, he called her “princess.” Then, abruptly, he asked if she knew what fellatio meant, and Robin sat up straight in her seat. She started gauging the hurt she’d endure if she leaped from the car, but then he said kindly that it was understandable that a young girl like her might not know, and he said it meant when a woman goes down on a man. “You know what that means, going down?” he asked, and then he said that he meant sucking cock. “The woman takes the penis right into her mouth. No teeth, though,” he said. “She has to kind of tuck them away.” Robin put her hand on the door, but he just switched on the radio and started to hum. He never asked her another question, he never did anything more than hum, and when he left her off, he told her she was a very nice girl. He smiled. And he waved at her when he drove off.

By the time the next ride came, she was so cold she just got in without checking faces or door handles. She got ride after ride, from women who lectured her about Richard Speck and the nine nurses, and once from a girl only a little older than she herself was, who told Robin about a maniac loose who liked to cut off the nipples of young girls and keep them preserved in solution in his trunk.

Some of the rides were pleasant. A woman bought her soup and a sandwich at a diner, insisting that she was hungry herself and that it was up to Robin whether she ate or waited inside a frosty car. A trucker brought her to his home, a split-level with red-white-and-blue shag carpeting. His wife gave Robin hot cocoa with marshmallows dotting into foam, and a grilled cheese sandwich, while he made a few phone calls. “It isn’t safe, what you’re doing,” the trucker’s wife told Robin. She wanted her to call home and get the first bus back. “Oh, it’s all right, I’m invincible,” Robin said.

“Nobody’s that,” said the wife.

Robin climbed back into the truck and slept while he drove her the rest of the way to Boston. By the time they arrived, the air was dusky, and she felt a little disoriented, homesick for something familiar.

She knew the name of Nick’s hotel, and she asked a few people for directions. It startled her, how many people were on the streets this early, how much noise. She walked past the gardens, and when she saw the swan boats, she got a small, sharp thrill. But when she got to them, the man told her they weren’t open yet; he said to come back in a few hours. Everything felt so different here. The people seemed to be harboring some secret knowledge she didn’t know how to access, and she felt unsure and out of place.

She took her time walking to her father’s hotel. She practiced in her mind how he might take her visit. He’d finally share the wonders of one of his cities with her. He’d be delighted. He’d swoop her off to dinner, take her to a mall or whatever they had here and buy her a dress to wear. Or maybe, maybe he’d be furious. Maybe he’d make her call Leslie and apologize. She’d get yelled at in stereo, but then the squall would flutter away and she’d still be here in this wondrous city with her father, on her way out to eat. Maybe, too, she would end up here when she went to college, and then he’d be the one to visit her, he’d be the one missing her because she just wasn’t at home anymore.

“Hey, bright eyes,” someone said, and, startled, she dipped her head. “Hey, pretty bitty,” the voice said, and she strode past, not looking at the face that went with the voice. She remembered Rick’s stories about big cities. Women walking past men who would spit beer into their hair. Things falling from windows—shopping carts weighted with bricks. A woman in the subway screaming because someone had thrown a bag of manure on her, no one even able to get close enough to help because of the stench. Robin shook the images away; she reminded herself just who she was, just what could and could not hurt her.

She was on Tremont Street, waiting for the light to change, pressed into a crowd so she could barely move, when there, across the street, she spotted her father. She elbowed forward a little. Someone cursed and pushed her back. “Jesus, are you out of your mind?” a woman said to her. “You can get killed on these streets crossing at the lights, let alone against them.”

Robin, pinned into place, tried to lift one hand into a wave, tried to call out, but all the noise smothered her sound. She strained up on tiptoe, and then there was her father again, in a clearing by the park, only he wasn’t alone. He was holding someone, a woman, bending her toward him as if there were no one else on the street but the two of them, moving her into a kiss.

Robin froze. The light clicked, the crowd moved like a tide, straining against her, but she couldn’t get her legs to work, suddenly couldn’t remember how to breathe, how to speak, how to do anything. “Move it,” someone said, jostling her, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything but watch the woman peeling away from her father, lifting up to kiss him again, on his forehead, on his nose, on his mouth, long and deep. The two of them separated, as smoothly as a seam, gliding in opposite directions, and then, without thinking, Robin began to follow the woman.

Dore was running herself a bath, sifting in rose bath salts, bubbling the water pink, when the doorbell rang. “Shit,” she said. It was only nine. She had warned Nick not to even think of calling her until ten. She needed the time to calm herself down from seeing him, to think about what it was she wanted to do about it. Every time he came back into her life, it was like an assault. She’d work herself up in knots, and then somehow he’d manage to loosen them up just by being with her. She’d get used to him again, feel the same old comfort starting to surround her like a blanket, and then he’d be gone and she’d have to pretend it wasn’t killing her, wasn’t ruining her life. The bath helped. The heat of it soaked out the lust and the need and the dreamy yearning; it let her rise up from the water like some Aphrodite reborn. She could feel alone with herself again. Alone and strong. She swished her hand in the water, lifting up bubbles, and the bell rang again.

Let the damned thing ring. Whoever it was would get tired and go away. Or they’d phone her. Her friends knew how she was about her privacy—they could be banging at her door and she wouldn’t answer if she was reading or watching an old movie on TV. You couldn’t get her to do anything she didn’t want to. Maybe the bell wasn’t even for her. There were kids who came into the foyer to smoke dope and sometimes bumped up against a bell. Dore ruffed her hair, snapped her jeans, and then heard the buzzer downstairs, steps in the hallway, along the stairs, and finally a loud, insistent knocking at her door. Who the hell let someone in on her bell? She wiped her hands against her jeans and went to the door, wrenching it open, glaring.

There, standing in front of her, was a young girl, her hair wild, her face a little dirty, her hands balled into fists. Dore let out a breath. Ah, she was used to this—this was familiar. She knew the look on that face all too well, the way the body was held, the pain contorted there. She could probably repeat this girl’s story back to her, word for word. She didn’t recognize the girl, but it didn’t matter. She must be a friend of a friend of a friend of one of her old students. They all knew she wouldn’t turn them away.

“Come on in,” she said, and the girl did.

Dore led her into the living room and sat her down. She knew what to do. “Wait just one sec,” she said, and went into the kitchen, quickly popping tea bags into blue china cups, hurrying the water to a boil. When she came out again with two cups on a tray, balancing a plate of chocolate snaps, she smiled. She fitted one of the cups into the girl’s hand. “Are you all right?” Dore asked. The girl stayed silent, but Dore was used to that, too.

The girl kept looking around, her face pinched and tight. Dore’s place was small, cluttered with books and photographs, snapshots taken in Woolworth’s four-for-a-dollar booth because she was too impatient to pose for a real picture. The girl got up and went to the shelf, her back to Dore. She was still for so long that finally Dore got up and lightly touched her. The girl seemed to contract. In her hand was a recent photograph of Nick, laughing into the camera. It had been taken just about a month ago, on a sunny day when they had driven out to the Cape. They were on a deserted beach, and Dore had been happy.

“Who’s this?” the girl asked, her voice low.

Dore started to take the photo, but the girl’s grip was strong. “Oh,” said Dore, “that’s my favorite runaway.” She smiled at the girl, who promptly burst into tears, letting the picture flutter down from her hands.

Dore wrapped her arms about the girl and let her cry against her. It always amazed her, how easy it was to comfort a stranger, how when you had nothing to lose, you could give everything. All these young bodies somehow just fit against her. Their heads rested against her neck, their chests were so close she could feel their hearts beating right through her. God help her, but it was heady.

Girls were the hardest for her. Sometimes, after they left, after she had helped them call their parents in another state, paying for the calls herself, after she had given advice until they smiled, after they had names and numbers of doctors tucked into their jeans, the apartment seemed so empty, it was an affront. She sometimes calculated ages. She’d think, This blonde must be twelve, the brunette, fourteen, and when they got close to the age Susan would have been, it started to hurt. She couldn’t stop herself, she felt the comparisons rising to the surface like cream. This one had hair like Susan would have had, thick and dark, pulled into a braid. This one loved to paint, the way she always imagined Susan would have. She made herself crazy with it.

“I wish you were my mother,” girls told her. They made her a model, they loved her for the few hours they were at the house, and then they disappeared. Sometimes she got stray postcards, scribbles proclaiming that someone would never forget her, but of course the someone always, inevitably, did. The visits were always one-time, and she always felt as if she had somehow come up short, as if she had failed yet again.

She took sleeping pills sometimes, the mild kind they sold over the counter, and as she rolled toward her dreams, she began thinking about Susan. What if she hadn’t died at all? What if she had been revived in some stark white room, kidnapped by a childless woman wandering the floors, pulled by her yearning to any small heartbeat? What if one of these girls forever showing up at her house was Susan, fully grown now, sent by fate, somehow meant to test her? Christians swore they could see Jesus in everyone. They were supposed to be kind to beggars and drunkards because anyone could be Jesus. What you do to him, you do to me. Her girls, Dore called them, her girls. Every one of them a potential Susan, a chance to make up for not having loved her enough, for not having been there to avert disaster.

The girl moved against Dore. Dore led her to the couch and sat her down. “You cry all you need,” she said.

The girl needed a lot. Dore sat there, her arm falling pins-and-needles asleep under the girl. This one would take some time in her telling, Dore thought.

When the girl finally lifted her head, she looked shamed and wouldn’t meet Dore’s eyes. Dore reached out and tilted the girl’s chin up. “What could be that bad?” Dore asked.

The girl looked angry, confused. She stood up and then sat right down again. “The man in the picture,” she said. “Who is he?”

Boy pain, Dore thought, another open wound of the heart. “He’s an old friend,” Dore said.

“A friend?”

“The best kind,” Dore said. “I love him.”

“But like a friend,” the girl said, sitting up. “You love him like a friend.”

“Well, more than that,” Dore began, but the girl was suddenly staring at her, making her uncomfortable.

“You know his family?” the girl said.

“His family? No, he’s an orphan.”

The girl started crying again, and Dore hunched toward her. “Listen, is this about a boy? Is that what’s wrong?” The girl seemed to sink down into herself. “Look, you can’t let men run you,” Dore said, then stopped, Nick’s face moving into her mind. “Right, Dore,” she said, and the girl looked up.

“Do you want to tell me?” Dore asked.

The girl rocked a little. “How did you meet him?”

She’s hedging, Dore thought. “You really want to hear this? You’re sure you really wouldn’t rather be doing the telling?”

“No,” the girl said, “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t at all.”

So Dore started telling stories about Nick. How they had met, how happy they had been, their life in the trailer. She didn’t talk about Susan. The girl kept looking down into her lap, threading her fingers, and then abruptly she bolted for the door.

“Hey!” Dore cried, getting up, and the girl stopped, freeze-framed like a deer in a blinding light. Dore fished around in the end-table drawer and pulled out a pencil and some crimped paper. Smoothing it, she hastily scribbled her name and her phone. “You have a place you can stay?” she asked. The girl nodded. “Well, I’ll just write out the address of the “Y” anyhow,” Dore said. “You never know, and it’s so cheap.” She handed the paper to the girl, who slowly took it. “You call if you need to talk. Anytime. And you can come back if you want to.” Dore sighed. “You want to tell me your name? Just the first one so if you call, I’ll know it?”

“No, no, I can’t,” the girl said.

“Wait again,” Dore said, and went to the bedroom to get some money. She came out and pressed ten dollars into the girl’s hand. “In case you get hungry.”

“I can’t take this,” the girl said.

“You just did,” Dore said, and the girl hesitated for a moment and then tucked it into her shirt. She put her hand on the door, and then Dore impulsively hugged her. She felt the girl stiffen. “How old are you?” Dore asked, but the girl pulled on the door and was gone.

Dore leaned along the wall, listening to the clatter of steps down the stairs. She went to the window and looked out, watching the girl stride down the street, seeing her pull out the paper Dore had given her and study it for a moment. Dore wondered what the matter was with this one, what could hurt so much she couldn’t find a voice to it. Anyway, Dore thought, it would be a story, wouldn’t it, to tell Nick when he got there.

For a while Robin just walked. She kept feeling Dore’s arms about her, seeing Dore’s face. That woman didn’t know Nick had a family, didn’t know where he lived or who Robin was, and yet she had a sure, simple claim to him anyway. Robin was a complete stranger to her, and yet she had let her into the apartment without even asking how she’d found her way to this door. She had given her money and an address and endless comforts without insisting on an explanation. Robin took out the piece of paper again and looked at the phone number, at Dore’s name scribbled across the top. She still wasn’t sure what was going on now between this woman and her father, only that something somehow was, and if there was anyone to hate about it, it was her father.

She walked, concocting accidents for him. She’d push him into the path of a subway. She’d wait for him in front of Dore’s so he’d know as soon as he saw her eyes blazing flame why she was so angry; and then, just as some lying explanation spilled from his lips, she’d stab him with a fork she had stolen from a restaurant. She thought about Leslie, and suddenly she was furious with her, too, for not knowing, for letting all this happen.

She didn’t want to spend another second in this city knowing her father was here and Dore was waiting for him. She looked out at the road. There were plenty of cars—she could probably line up a ride to Pittsburgh soon enough. She stood out in the center of the road and jabbed out her thumb.

She didn’t get back to Pittsburgh until after two in the morning. She had been lucky again, getting a ride for most of the way from a middle-aged truck driver. He made her sit in the back behind a faded pink curtain because, he said, it was illegal for him to pick up anyone and he had been docked for it once before. She didn’t mind it behind the curtain. There was a pillow, a blanket, and the steady drone of the road to put her to sleep, deep and dark and dreamless.

He woke her up in front of a taxi stand and insisted on waiting until she got another ride. It took her only two more rides to get into the city, and then she used Dore’s ten dollars for a cab, giving the driver the entire bill for a $3.50 fare, a little surprised when he didn’t even thank her.

The lights were blazing in the house. Before Robin even stepped onto the flagstone, the front door jerked open and Leslie strode down the walk toward her. Robin froze in place. Leslie, silent, lifted one hand and slapped Robin’s face. Dizzy with fear, Robin stepped back. Leslie had never struck her before, never, but here she was again, moving forward, and Robin shut her eyes. But there were arms about her, her mother’s breath against her neck, the feverish warmth of embrace. Two women hugging her in one day, Robin thought, confusing her, confusing time. “Let’s get inside,” Leslie said.

Leslie seesawed between anger and relief. One minute she was telling Robin to go get into a hot bath, that she would bring her in hot cider, some aspirin; the next moment Leslie was grounding her for three weeks, shouting question after question about where Robin had been.

“I called every name I could remember, every name I could find in your room. I woke people up,” Leslie said. “I was so nervous, I called the same names twice, three times—what did I care when people threatened me?” She brushed her hair from one shoulder. “Oh, God,” she said. “I kept seeing you—I kept trying to feel you in my gut, to sense where you were, how you were, and all I felt was how very lost you were to me, and how terrified I was.” She sat down. “Where were you?” she whispered.

Robin looked at her lap. She hated her mother, she loved her. “Philadelphia,” Robin said.

“Philadelphia?”

Robin didn’t even realize she was crying until she felt Leslie’s body cushioned around her, rocking her, telling her that whatever it was, it was going to be all right, that she shouldn’t be afraid to talk. The more she said that, the more hysterical Robin felt. Leslie smoothed Robin’s hair. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. “You get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning we’ll talk.”

Sunday morning, at the kitchen table, picking at the eggs Leslie had fixed for her, Robin made something up. She said she had impulsively bought a train ticket to Philadelphia to see a friend who had moved there. She had used the money she was saving for a leather jacket. She hadn’t called because she thought she’d be back in time, and when she missed her train, she was afraid. That was why she had been crying, why she had been so wired.

Leslie, sipping coffee, shook her head. “How could you be so irresponsible? How could you do something so cruel? I was scared.”

“I’m not a baby,” Robin said.

Leslie looked angrily over at her. “You could be ninety and it still wouldn’t matter to me, I’d still be terrified and worried if you just up and left without even thinking enough of me to let me know.” She pushed at her coffee cup. “You’re so damned independent.”

“I’m sorry,” Robin said, but Leslie was getting up, clearing dishes, telling Robin she was grounded for a month. She turned toward her. “Go on,” she said, “finish up those eggs.”

All that day, Robin felt wounded. She carried Dore’s phone number in her jeans pocket, pulling it out to look at it, stuffing it back into her pocket, unable to just tear it up. Sometimes she told herself it was a mistake. She didn’t have the facts. Dore could have been lying. She might barely know Nick.

She wandered into Leslie’s workroom and interrupted her to ask if Nick had ever lived in a trailer. Leslie burst into laughter. “A trailer?” she said, tickled. “Does your father look like the type to live in a trailer?” She couldn’t get over it. She wanted to know where Robin had gotten such a wild thought.

“Oh, it was just something I was reading,” Robin said, leaving the room.

She began watching Leslie with a new, critical eye. Leslie didn’t brush her hair very often, and she sometimes wore blouses without buttons, even though she fussed at Robin’s skewed hems. She wore stained, oversize T-shirts of Nick’s to work, and heavy flannel gowns to bed. She almost never wore makeup, and when she did, it smeared because she kept rubbing and stroking it off while she sewed.

When the phone rang that night, Robin didn’t rush to pick it up. Leslie grabbed it, and Robin saw how her mother’s whole face changed, how she said Nick’s name, curling up around the phone as if it were a lover.

Robin kept thinking that nothing her father ever did had anything to do with her—that was the problem. She was in bed when he finally got home, and she sat up, listening. She could smell the perfume Leslie had put on, she could hear Leslie’s low laughter, but Nick’s voice was low and serious—she couldn’t make it out even though she got up and pressed her face against her door. “Oh, Lord,” Leslie said. “Who do you think you are, making me miss you like this?”

Robin felt her heart hardening up inside of her, making her rigid. She wanted to walk right out into the living room in her T-shirt and socks and accuse him. She wanted to shout at her mother for not being prettier, for not being somehow better. She lay back in bed in a fever of reverie. She saw herself confronting Nick, shouting accusations, but then, suddenly, she saw Nick moving, on his own, uncontrolled by her imagination. She saw his face fading of feeling. She saw him neither denying nor affirming one single thing she said, only picking up the same two black leather bags he had brought into the house and taking them right outside again. “If you don’t trust me, if that’s the way you feel…” he said. She saw Leslie moving toward Nick, noticing her only enough to flash her a warning look of hatred. The car hadn’t even had time to cool yet; the motor was ready to go, ready to take him back to Dore, back to anyplace that held no room for her.

Robin pulled the sheet slowly up over her head. She prayed. Not to her old guardian angels, not to Nick, but to Dore this time. She concentrated on Dore’s face, her hair, the feel of her skin where Robin had touched her. Promise me, Robin transmitted, promise you won’t take him totally, that you’ll leave something for here. Promise it. Promise.

In the morning, Leslie had to wake her. Leslie’s hair was clean, brushed down her back. She had on a red dress and blue clip-on earrings and she looked happy. “Sleepy jean,” she said. “Let’s go.” She waited for Robin to rouse herself, then told her she hadn’t said a word to Nick about the incident. She thought the whole matter was something the two of them could handle between themselves. “Like a conspiracy,” she said. “Now scoot downstairs and say hello to your father.”

Robin threw on a black corduroy dress, black tights and sneakers, and sprinted out the back door, combing her hair with her fingers, stopping only when the knots were too fierce for her. She turned only so that she could see Nick was actually there, before her head started hurting, and she blurted out that she was late, that if she mad-dashed it, she could catch the bus.

“I’ll drive you,” Nick said, but she was gone.

She avoided him as best she could, coming home right after school, barricading herself in her room with sandwiches and cookies, the warm, flat fizz of the canned Cokes she kept on her windowsill. She said she didn’t feel well; she said she had to study. When she could, she stayed at the “Y,” diving, trying riskier and riskier moves, staying submerged so long that the lifeguard came and poked the rescue pole down at her. She was lectured on safety, she was warned, but it only made her more reckless.

When she heard Nick approach at night, she bunched over her desk, feigning sleep. He came in and gently lifted her from her chair, placed her on the bed, and pulled a light cover over her. She was so startled she couldn’t breathe right. She lay paralyzed, waiting for him to go, but he just stayed there; she felt him so close she could have moved a half-inch and touched him with her shoulder. Go, leave, she willed, but when he finally did get up, when she heard his sigh, she felt like crying out for him to return.

Mornings, she got up an hour early. She never ate breakfast at home anymore, but stopped at a coffee shop a block away from school. She nursed tinny-tasting cocoa that came from a machine; she picked at greasy cheese Danish and talked to the waitress, the only other person there.

She didn’t know how she felt when she came out of school one day to find Nick waiting for her, leaning against the car. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, “long time no see.” He was in a leather jacket and jeans. He wanted to know if he was embarrassing her, coming to school like this. He said he knew how kids felt about their parents when they got to be her age, but he figured this was the only way he was sure to see her.

He made her buckle her seat belt so she felt imprisoned, and then he drove a little; he said he wanted to talk to her.

“About what,” she asked. She looked out at the street, unsnap-ping her buckle.

“Hey, hook that up,” he said. “A vacation,” he told her. “I thought we could go to a travel agency. It used to be my favorite thing in the world to do.”

“I’m too old for a family vacation,” Robin said.

“Too old for Hawaii?”

“How about Boston?” she said abruptly.

He turned right. “Too touristy this time of year. And anyway, that’s no vacation for me. I go there all the time.”

She didn’t want the ice cream. She didn’t want to get out at the travel agency. He pulled out folders to show her, but she just shrugged uneasily at them. He had fliers for Paris, for Egypt, for places so far away that no one could ever reach you; and finally, taking a bunch of them, he said they could go.

He waited until they were back in the car before he suddenly turned to her and asked her what was wrong. When she just shrugged, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. “You don’t like me much lately, do you?” he asked.

She looked out the window, her eyes steely.

“Am I wrong?” he asked.

“Do you love mom?” she asked.

He was startled. “Why would you even think to ask something like that? Don’t you think I do?”

She was so silent that when he sighed, she thought for a moment the sigh came from her. “Do you think I like to leave?” he asked. “Don’t you think it’s hard? Don’t you think it’s lonely?” He pulled out his wallet and showed her the plastic folders filled with her face and Leslie’s. He pulled down the visor on the front window and showed her another picture of herself clipped up there.

He was buckling up his own face; she was afraid to ask him what he was thinking, afraid to say anything that might put her fear out into the open. You could give flesh and blood and bone to any thought just by giving it a voice; you could make all the dangers you ever worried about take on a life so strong you could never snuff it out. She swallowed.

“I’m just tired,” she said. “School.”

“Robin, listen to me—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said. “Really. I feel much better.”

He looked at her doubtfully, then drove her home, the two of them in silence, and he didn’t show up at her school again. He seemed to be waiting for something from her. He’d walk over to her when she was reading in the living room; he’d stand in her light until she looked up at him.

“So, what are you reading?” he asked. She told him, but he never seemed to be really listening; he seemed to be just looking at her, just taking her in.

He began leaving her alone again, although he still talked about family vacations. She found travel brochures scattered all over the house. Bright foldouts of Spanish beaches on top of the kitchen counter, pamphlets about Aruba by the shower. She heard Leslie proposing Florida one evening, telling him about a trip she had taken with her parents when she was just five, down for some tennis matches her mother had easily won, her father sweeping in second in the men’s division. She said she remembered how yellow the sun was, she remembered the crocodiles that were teased for all the tourists. In the end, though, no plans were ever made about anything, and everything, for Robin, just seemed to be dangerously adrift.