FIFTEEN

Nick drove. It was funny not working, not having to meet appointments, not having to do anything but drive. He wasn’t interested in forgetting. He pressed himself to remember everything, to make the past so real it might breathe back into life again.

He sped on the highway and unrolled his life like a movie. He saw himself standing in a long white school corridor, watching Dore stumble toward him; he remembered the shape of her breasts, how pale her skin was, so that even when she managed to get something of a tan, she still looked completely untouched by the sun. He saw himself in the back of a cab, holding Leslie, while Robin struggled to get born. And he saw Robin, a toddler, teething on his itinerary book, so that when he took it from her, there were her teeth marks in the leather. He replayed scene after scene as he moved from state to state, and when it got to be too much, when it got too real, he pulled over to the side of the road and rested his head in his hands.

For a while, out of habit, he wrote in his itinerary book. He wrote down the time he made, the Kentucky Fried Chickens where he ate, the Hardy Beef Boys where he got indigestion, and, more imporant, he kept detailed accounts of when he had tried to call Leslie, and when he had tried Dore. At night, sleeping in the too soft bed of some cheap hotel, or sometimes in the back seat of the car with his legs cramped about him, he leafed back through the book, and seeing the names made him relax a little, made him feel as if he were still a part of them. In every new city, he stopped and bought postcards. He wrote “I MISS YOU,” “I’M SO SORRY,” “I LOVE YOU.“ Anyone could tell where he was just by the postmark. Anyone could follow.

He was in Michigan when he finally reached Leslie, but she was cold on the phone. She wanted to know who he thought he was calling her. She said after they were divorced she might talk to him, but not now.

“What, I’ll be safe then?” he asked.

“I’m hanging up,” she said.

“Let me talk to Robin,” he begged, but she said Robin didn’t want to talk to him any more than she did, and in any case Robin wasn’t home, and then she hung up.

He was still in Michigan when he decided he wanted a lawyer. He wanted to give support money to Robin, and he also wanted to be sure he had visitation rights in writing. He called Pittsburgh, and wired a retainer to the first lawyer he called, who told Nick to call him regularly to see what was going on. Nick stayed in Michigan a few weeks, long enough for his lawyer to tell him that Leslie’s lawyer said she was adamant about not taking a dime from Nick, and that as far as visitation went, Robin wouldn’t discuss it. “I knew it,” Nick said glumly, but his lawyer told him to give it time. “It’s not like she’s some little kid you can just whisk away. Visitation rights or not, if she doesn’t want to see you, you can’t make her.”

The last thing Nick did before he left Michigan was open a bank account for Robin. He told the bank he’d be mailing in money, but he wanted all the statements mailed to his daughter. She’d open those statements just because they looked official and adult, just because they were from a bank and not from him, and she’d see the money growing into something, she’d somehow know that he was taking care of her, and that was a kind of love, wasn’t it? That surely counted for something.

He drove. He stopped in Madison, hot and hungry, missing everything he had left so much that he couldn’t seem to breathe right. He was planning to stay only a day or so, long enough to check in with his lawyer, to relax, but then he started walking around, and he fell in love with the lake and the boats, with the bats idly whirling around the gold dome of the capitol building, and he thought he’d stop his traveling right then and there. He rented a whole two-story house on Miffland Street for less money than it would have cost him anywhere else, and he moved in immediately, filling it with a few pieces of used furniture, a new bed, and lots of books.

He couldn’t stand not doing anything, but he didn’t want to take on too much responsibility. He kept telling himself that any moment he might have to leave to reclaim his old life, any second the phone might ring and it might be Dore telling him it had all been a mistake. He took a job clerking at a place called Brini’s, a small bookshop owned by an old man named Jack Scarzinni, who clearly thought Nick was nuts to take a job so beneath him, a job reserved for college kids who needed book money and date money and that was about all. But Jack was also smart enough to know he’d be getting intelligent company by hiring Nick; he’d be getting another man with whom to while away the slow afternoons over a good game of chess.

Jack told Nick he had started the store himself, over fifty years ago, naming it after his wife, Brini. Brini had spent half her life worrying about how she would ever manage to run the place herself if Jack upped and died on her. “She was so crazy that way,” Jack told Nick. “She wouldn’t let me have an ice cream in peace because she was sure I’d have a heart attack. She wouldn’t let me carry anything heavy—she’d try to heave it up herself.”

In the end, though, it was Brini who keeled over and died one summer day when the mercury had climbed to 104°. She was only thirty-eight, and no one could figure out why she died, even after the autopsy. “I never forgave her,” Jack said. “Lying to me like that, pretending that I was going to be the one to do the leaving. I’d never have left her. Never.”

Nick liked Jack and he liked working at Brini’s. He kept the stock in order, he worked the register, and when the salesmen came in, he went into the back and kept to himself.

One evening he phoned his home office in Philadelphia and told his boss he needed more time. “This is getting tiresome,” his boss said, but he gave him the time anyway.

It startled Nick when he began recognizing the customers who came into Brini’s, when they started recognizing him. And then people in his neighborhood began to be familiar, too. The woman next door waved to him mornings. Once, she brought him some brownies she had baked herself. “Too many rots the kids’ teeth,” she told him. But just the same, whenever he found himself looking forward to going to work, to coming home to a neighbor who waved to him, he told himself it was all only temporary; he straightened up and started planning his next letter to Dore, his next payment into Robin’s bank account, his next call to Leslie.

Dore stopped expecting anything from anybody. She got herself an unlisted number and a new job teaching high-school English. At night she lay in bed with a book and a glass of wine. Time didn’t seem to be doing anything. She was in a kind of vacuum, which was all right for her, because she knew that as soon as she saw any kind of movement, the pain would start up again, and she would remember just what she had lost, just what she no longer had any chance of having.

It surprised her when she came home one day to find a man waiting for her. It took her a moment to recognize Ray, the man who had taken her to the coffee shop that night when she had been running from Nick.

“How did you find me?” she asked him.

He grinned. He told her he had looked her up in an old phone book. When he dialed the number, he found it had been changed to an unlisted one, but he had taken a chance that her address was still the same. “So come have another coffee with me,” he said; and simply because she was lonely, she said fine.

He began coming around. She told him the truth—that she didn’t care whether he came around or not, that she didn’t have anything to offer him right now. “Oh, I don’t think that’s so true,” he said. He came over every Friday; he was polite and unpushy. He brought her comic books and daisies, gifts so cheap, or so silly, that she couldn’t possibly find any reason to refuse them. He treated her hostile moods as nothing more than squalls, which would blow over any moment if he just stuck around and waited.

“This is never going to work out,” she told him. “So don’t think that it is. I don’t want a relationship. I can’t even handle a friend.” She wouldn’t let him call her during the week, and when she found herself thinking about him, she got her jacket and took a walk. Sometimes she thought about hiring a detective to check up on him and make sure he didn’t have a wife in the background, another woman he liked to bring comic books to. But that would have meant that she cared enough to worry, so she dropped the idea.

She slept with him sometimes when she was the most lonely, when she was missing Nick, but she would never let him stay at her place, and she wouldn’t go to his. She made him go to hotels with her, the two of them driving in separate cars. He always stood outside with her before she drove away again, and when she bent to open her car door, he gently placed his hand just on top of her head so she wouldn’t bump it when she got in. The gesture touched her so much, she had to bite down on her lower lip to keep from crying. As soon as he removed his hand from her head, she missed it, she wanted it back.

Nick was getting ready to leave for Brini’s, making coffee, overcooking some brown eggs in a skillet, when the phone rang. It startled him. No one ever called him, except for an occasional wrong number, and then he always had to suppress his instinct to engage the voice in conversation. He lifted up the receiver and there was Leslie’s voice, washing over him like cool water, taking his breath.

“Is she there?” Leslie blurted.

Nick sat down, sighing. Oh, Dore, he thought. To think of her as actually here, in the other room, humming as she corrected papers, always grading on how hard she thought the student tried rather than on the actual quality of the work. “If an A student can get an A without even thinking about it, what good is it?” she used to say. She wanted to see originality. She wanted to see risk. Risk—he had shown that.

“I haven’t heard from her since when,” he said.

“Oh, God, neither have I,” Leslie said, and burst into tears, surprising him so much, he stood up. It was hard to understand her; she was tumbling out words, saying something about the police being rude to her, about wanting him to help with money so she could hire a detective, and then, in a snag of conversation, he heard Robin’s name, and he realized just who it was that was missing.

He felt something crumpling inside of him, an implosion. Robin unsafe. “I’ll find her,” he said.

“I wouldn’t call you except I don’t know what to do anymore. The cops told me to wait another week or so, can you imagine? A week or so, they said. Kids come back, they said.”

“It’s all right,” Nick said. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll take care of it. I’ll look for her myself. I’ll even hire someone and I’ll call you every week. Every single week.”

“You’ll let me know?” Leslie said, crying. “You’ll find her and send her home?” She snuffled. “She hates me. I never did anything to her, and she hates me—”

“No one hates you,” he said. “And I’ll find her. I’ll call you next Monday. At six. Don’t worry.”

He hung up in a confusion of feelings. First was the deep, raw edge of panic about Robin, the visions of her wandering about in a shabby subway, foraging in dumpsters for something to eat, or, worse, in the arms of some man who had plans. He refused to think of her as anything but alive. “Robin!” he said, as if his voice might position her into place until he could get her.

He felt helpless, but he felt elated, too, because now he had the right to call Leslie every week. Now she would willingly talk to him, and if he found Robin, if he sent her home, Leslie might be glad enough to actually see him. He’d have the right to contact Dore, too, because Robin had been close to her and might go there. It brought him a kind of twisted joy.

He wasn’t sure where to start. How did you go about looking for someone who might not want to be found? He took out ads addressed to her, begging her to call him. He put them in papers he thought kids read—the bulletin-board back pages of the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, weeklies in Berkeley. He splurged and took out ads offering rewards for information about her, but all he got were crank responses. He got letters offering other young girls—girls who could use their tongues as instruments, girls who would do whatever he asked as long as he paid attention to their price rates.

Finally, he went to a detective named Rory Clarkson, who frowned at him and said that Nick would have to let him handle it alone—that if Robin didn’t want to be found and Nick went out looking for her, he’d only end up pushing her farther into hiding. He told Nick that while finding his daughter might be a piece of cake, it might be difficult to get her to return home. “But you leave it to me,” Clarkson said.

Nick did what he could. He sent Dore a card at her old address, figuring it would be forwarded to her. He got back a plain white postcard, mailed from Vermont; she wrote that she was sorry about Robin, but she hadn’t heard anything. She said if Robin showed up, she would send her home, since Robin obviously didn’t belong with her. Seeing Dore’s writing lit up something inside of Nick.

He waited. He went to work, but he didn’t tell Jack anything about why he looked so exhausted, why other times he was so wired he couldn’t sit still. Jack, who believed everyone was entitled to keep his wounds private, never pressed Nick for explanations. Instead, he did what he could to change Nick’s moods in other ways. He let him take over ordering all the stock, and when Nick gave him a suspicious look, Jack told him to just keep his spine in joint, that he was giving him the job because he himself was too lazy to fuss with the forms anymore. And anyway, Nick knew the customers as well as he did, and knew the stock even better, since he was the one who took care of all the shelving and returns these days. It did help Nick. He was somehow nourished by the extra work, the responsibility. He’d work long hours, interrupted only when Jack took him for something to eat at Rennabaum’s Drugstore, where, Jack claimed, they served the tastiest liver and onions in the whole town.

Every Monday, Nick called Leslie, but when he hung up, he always felt dislocated, strange. He had comforted her, and she needed him—she actually thought he could find Robin—but the whole time he was having nightmares about Robin floating facedown in the Atlantic. He’d wake, confusing the salt of his own sweat with the ocean. He saw Robin in every ragamuffin kid begging spare change on the street. He gave them all dollar bills, ignoring their sly smiles, because they could be Robin. And yet, there was something else, too, something he couldn’t explain. He had this feeling that Robin was somehow orchestrating all of this—that she, among all of them, was really the only one who knew what she was doing, the only one who had any sort of control.

Robin thought that the closer she and Douglas got to California, the more she would shed her family like an extra coat she didn’t need in the sun, and the more bound together she’d feel to Douglas. She kept twisting the gold wedding band he had hastily bought her, kept glancing over at his gold ring, but he was harried. He didn’t speak to her much. He wanted to put as much distance between them and Pennsylvania as possible, but the traffic was terrible, and every time a police car passed, he seemed to stiffen.

His mood didn’t lift until the next day, and then he parked the car and took her with him to buy some bread and cheese and a bottle of wine, and that night, he drove the car to a park where they could watch the sky. They toasted each other with the wine.

“Look at you, I can’t believe you’re mine,” he said. “You wait, as soon as we can, we’ll have a real wedding. I’ll buy you a whole new ring. An expensive one.”

“I don’t need a new ring,” said Robin, stroking hers.

He bent to kiss her. “You know what? I feel married to you. I am married to you. I can’t help it. I keep thinking of you as my wife, as Mrs. Nylon. I love you so much,” he said, and his eyes were shining, and so starry that Robin shivered.

He sped toward California. Robin stared dreamily out the window and twirled her wedding band about her finger. Everywhere they stopped, she looked for opportunities to announce herself as Mrs. Douglas Nylon, a name with none of her family in it. She got out library cards she wouldn’t be in town long enough to use; she made dinner reservations she would call to cancel a half-hour later. She called Douglas “my husband” to anyone who would listen. “My husband loves apples,” she informed a vendor on the street. “My husband already has today’s Times,” she told a boy hawking papers. “Okay, okay,” Douglas said, extricating his hand from hers. “Enough’s enough.”

She began annoying him on the ride. She kept buying books at every place they stopped, paperback classics she’d read while he was driving. “You’re making me dizzy,” he informed her. “How can you read when we’re moving?” She just looked at him for a moment and then returned to her book. She read in restaurants when they stopped for hamburgers; she read before they stretched out in the car as best they could to try to sleep. And when he woke up in the morning, cramped, his legs hurting, she was contentedly reading, unaware of him or the muggy smell of the car, of the long, tedious stretch of highway ahead of them.

And she read so fast. She’d run into drugstores to find a book and then two hours later she’d be carefully placing it in back among the growing pile, and reaching for another. She told him she always read quickly, but he didn’t believe her—he said she must be skimming, she must be losing half of what she read, and he wanted to quiz her. He picked up Bleak House, which she had read in one day, and held it up. “All right, tell me the theme,” he said.

“I will not,” she said. “Leave me alone.” She plucked up The Sun Also Rises, and contentedly, she began reading, leaving him to maneuver and drive.

When they finally got to California, they rented a tiny studio apartment an hour north of San Francisco. It was really too small for two people, although Robin kept saying how cozy it was. They bought a pull-out sofa that took up so much space when it was pulled out that you had to walk right over it to get to the bathroom. The plaster was chipping off in the corners, and no matter how much Robin cleaned, there was always dust. She set up the books she had piled in the car, and she waited for a married routine to start.

It didn’t take Douglas long to find a job teaching at the local high school, but he didn’t like it. The kids were spoiled. They didn’t listen to him and they made constant fun of his accent, of his pale skin. When he walked into the room, the kids hummed “Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

“So who wants skin cancer?” Douglas said, and even as he spoke, a girl in the back was adjusting her strap over a tan line, a guy was checking his supply of zinc oxide in his pack. They weren’t interested in science, he told Robin, unless it had to do with setting up home labs to make designer drugs. They didn’t even read unless the book had already been made into a movie.

He was startled when Robin refused to go back to high school. “Why should I?” she asked. “I have responsibilities.” She had all these ideas of how a married woman starting out acted, and not one of them had anything to do with Leslie. She went out and got a part-time job waitressing at the local Arby’s, and on her way home she’d stop and buy one of those women’s magazines so she could figure out a recipe for dinner. She carried Ladies’ Home journal and Woman’s Day under her arm, unbagged, so everyone could see.

Douglas didn’t like it that sometimes when he left school he’d find Robin waiting outside for him, looking younger than some of his students. He didn’t like coming home to a five-course dinner he didn’t feel like eating because it was just too hot outside. She wanted to make love all the time. She kept her hands on him even when he was sitting outside at night, trying to get cool because they couldn’t afford anything better than a fan, and all that did was stir up the dust. “Isn’t this wonderful?” Robin said, leaning her head against his shoulder, shyly taking his hand, but all he could think about was the clean, quiet lab in Pittsburgh, the air-conditioning in his old apartment.

They kept to themselves. Robin didn’t mind; she liked it that she seemed to be the center for him, that he never even wanted to go out with anyone else. He didn’t tell her that he turned down invitations from other teachers because he was afraid they would judge him. He felt as if he were waiting for Robin to turn eighteen so they could get married, so he could feel respectable. On her sixteenth birthday, even though it was just the two of them, he wouldn’t let her put any candles on her cake because he didn’t want to be reminded.

It was easy enough to go from spending time just with her to spending time by himself, easy enough to hang out alone without her asking him fifty times if he loved her, without her always touching him, always watching him, her eyes so needy he felt as if she were drinking him right down. He’d come home and she’d be silently waiting for him on the porch, and then he’d see how beautiful she was and his insides would rush into water; he’d remember how he had felt about her before, how her innocence and her need had intoxicated him then. He’d sit down beside her and take her head in his hands and kiss her nose. “You’ll never leave me, will you?” she said. “Never, ever.”

He sighed. “No, never.”

“You’ll always love me,” she said. “You’ll always take care of me.”

“Always,” he said, his mouth dry.

“You’ll always need me,” she said, and this time he stretched up; he told her they should go inside and get something nice and cool to drink.

She wouldn’t let herself get lonely, wouldn’t let herself think one single thing could be wrong. She never worried that Nick or Leslie would show up. She knew she was bound to Douglas now and had nothing to do with either of them. She worked at making herself and Douglas as much of a family as she could. She thought families should have dogs, something she had never been allowed because Leslie didn’t like them, and she went down to the Animal Rescue League and picked out a small yellow mutt. Douglas gave her a look when he saw the dog, but because it made her so happy, because it took some of the focus away from him, he agreed they should keep it. “Next, we need a baby,” she said, wrapping her arms about his neck. “Like we need a hole in our brains,” he told her, but he nuzzled her neck and suddenly wanted her so much, he dipped her down to the floor.

She named the dog Toby. It thrilled her to come home and see the dog prancing around waiting for her—she swore he barked out her name. Toby followed her around, adoring. He slept at her feet at night, and when she woke, hot, and padded into the bathroom to lie on the cool white tiles, she’d wake to find the dog there with her. She found herself thinking about the dog all the time. She stole treats for him at Arby’s, long strips of lean roast beef, hamburger meat. When she took her lunch break, she’d walk home in her uniform with a sandwich and share it with the dog, one hand ruffling up the yellow fur on his back. When she had to leave to get back to work, Toby whined and tried to leave with her.

“I’ll be back,” she soothed. “I’ll always be back.”

She and the dog would go and meet Douglas after school; they’d shadow him to the beach and to the market. “Can’t I have some time to myself?” he asked. “Give me a kiss,” she told him. She was upset when he was late, and she worried when he came home silent, when he didn’t want to tell her about his day. “You’re shutting me out of your life,” she said, but he shook his head; he said the problem was more that she was taking over his life. Wounded, she drew back; she went to take Toby for a walk.

She told herself their life was stabilizing. She tracked the months they were together in the studio, chalking up six months, then a year, then a little more. There were long periods when he seemed less than delighted with her, true, but there were also stretches when he surprised her with flowers, when he tumbled her to the floor to make love. And when she turned seventeen, he seemed visibly happier—he even let her put candles on the cake he bought for her. “One more year and we’ll be home free,” he told her, and she relaxed, because it was future talk.

She was sure what they needed to really cement their life together was a baby. If she got pregnant now, it could be born by the time they married for real. But when she broached the subject to him, he laughed. “You’re the baby around here,” he told her. She didn’t tell him when she started coming to bed without her diaphragm. She made a show of going into the bathroom, where she daubed a swirl of Ortho cream about her vagina where he would taste it, so he would never suspect.

In the spring, the weather started changing. It was earthquake season, people said. Robin blamed the weather for the way Douglas was acting again—his distancing himself from her, his silence. She asked one of the other waitresses at Arby’s, who claimed to be an expert on earthquakes, if the weather could do things to people. The girl laughed. “Oh, sure,” she said. “It makes my cat crazy.” She told Robin to get some bottled water to keep in the house, to hit the ground if she felt a tremor.

“Oh, stop scaring her,” Robin’s boss said. “Look at her—she’s blue around the gills already.”

“I am like fun,” Robin said, but she went into the small employee bathroom and studied her reflection.

She began feeling nauseated in the mornings, as if she were seasick. The dog padded after her, concerned, rubbing up against her bare legs until she shivered. She missed one period and then another, and then she went to the free clinic over on Horatio Street and waited three hours to see a doctor. The doctor looked at her wedding band, but he didn’t really believe she was married, because she was so young. He said he wanted her to tell him the truth. He kept smiling, sympathetic, waiting, and before she left he gave her pamphlets—“Abortion, the Right Choice” and “Giving Your Baby Up for Adoption.” “You think about it,” he told her, but she crumpled the pamphlets in her hand and stuffed them into the trash on her way out.

She knew Douglas. He’d do what was right. He’d let her have the baby and he’d love it because that was what fathers were supposed to do. The thing that worried her lately, though, was whether or not he’d love her. He had gotten even more distant. Angry when she called him at work to ask if he wanted string beans or limas for dinner, to tell him she missed him in just the two hours he had been gone. “God, can’t you do anything by yourself?” he asked her when she trailed him on his walks, when she wanted to come with him to the tennis courts and watch him hit balls. At night he turned from her when she woke him up wanting to make love. She stroked his penis, but he said he needed his sleep. Uneasy, she touched his belly. “Just tell me what you want,” she whispered.

“Maybe what I want is just something you don’t have,” he said, punching down his pillow. “I gotta sleep,” he said, rolling from her, leaving her reaching her hands out into the darkness for the dog, for whatever comfort she could find.

She told herself there was plenty of time to tell him about the baby. She fought her unease by concentrating on the life inside of her, by letting the baby carry her through her days. She talked to it the same way she talked to the dog, so that whenever she was telling the baby how pretty California was, describing the sky and the trees, the dog would perk up his ears and bark happily. She developed a habit of keeping one hand on her stomach, so that her boss began asking her if she had eaten something that didn’t agree with her.

“No,” she said, smiling, secretive, “I’m okay.”

“Well, cut that out, then,” he told her. “It isn’t good for business to have you always looking like you got a funny taste in your mouth.”

It was two days later when the dog started whining and carrying on. “We ought to just get rid of him,” Douglas said, brushing dog hair off his jacket, heading for the door.

“Oh, we should not,” said Robin, stooping to try to pet the dog, who cowered from her, bunching himself up under the table. She left him a dish of hamburger meat to tempt him, a clean bowl of water, and then she went to work, and when she came home, she couldn’t find him anywhere.

“Hey, Toby!” she called, clapping her hands. She checked the loose back window the dog sometimes used to get out of the house. She checked under the beds. She went into the kitchen again to make herself a cup of tea, to calm herself down. She was just about to pour herself a second cup when the whole apartment suddenly started to vibrate.

Robin grabbed the edge of the table, but it shook in her hand; it rattled the teacup and saucer right off the edge so they smashed into pieces, so the tea slid and stained the floor. She crouched down, terrified, beneath the table, holding on to the legs, trying to remember what you were supposed to do, and around her the cups rattled and fell from the shelves, the paperback books she had amassed rained down from on top of the dresser, from the cabinets. When she dared to glance up and saw the stove shivering in place, she started crying. She tried to place her hands on her stomach, to comfort the baby, to comfort herself, but she couldn’t feel anything inside of her, and for the first time she didn’t feel she was any child of danger at all, she didn’t feel safe or reckless, she didn’t feel anything but absolutely and terrifyingly alone. She started crying harder, dipping her body as low to the floor as she could, and then, almost as soon as the tremor started, it stopped.

She wouldn’t get up from under the table. Gradually, she heard voices outside, steps in the building, and nervous spurts of laughter. Slowly, she started to unpeel herself and stood up.

She looked around the studio, keeping one hand braced along the wall. Other than the smashed plates and glasses, there wasn’t much damage. If you didn’t know what had happened, you might just have thought there had been a fight going on, people throwing things out of rage.

She made herself move to the phone to call Douglas. She made the principal call him out of class, and as soon as she heard his voice, she started crying again. “Hey, hey,” Douglas said. “Come on, it was just a tremor.” He told her they hadn’t even stopped class for it. He tried to cheer her up by telling her how all his students made fun of it, how they called it a “tourist quake” meant to impress anyone not smart enough to know it was nothing at all.

“I don’t care about that,” she said. “Come home.”

She didn’t clean up anything. She wanted him to see how terrible it had been for her. She sat quietly under the table, and when she remembered, she got up and called for the dog.

Douglas didn’t come home until four, his usual time, and as soon as he saw her face, and the apartment, he took her in his arms and rocked her; he made her come and sit on the sofa bed with him.

“Listen, I just couldn’t leave. I had to take over another class, and then I had to give a test.”

“But I asked you,” she said.

He was silent for a minute, and then he looked at her and told her that was the trouble, she was always asking, and he couldn’t keep answering her the way she wanted. She was too young and he was too tired of it. “I think we should get you back home,” he said.

“No,” she said, “you don’t think that one bit.”

“I do,” he said. “I must have been crazy running away with a student, thinking it would work. And now that we’re out here, I see how things are, I see how they’ll get.”

“You love me,” she said. “I know you do.”

He put his head in his hands, pushed his hair back with his fingers. When he looked up at her, his face was crumpled. “Look at you,” he said. “You should have a high-school diploma. You should be thinking about college.”

“You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know at all.” She stood up, suddenly fueled by anger. She plucked up her sweater from the floor, still damp from the tea that had spilled across it. “Who says?” she said. He started telling her something about the rent being paid up for the whole month, about his staying someplace else, but she concentrated on the sound the lock made as she opened it, on the sudden sharp slam of the door against him.

There was a note when she got back home, wrapped about $250 in cash. “Go home, Robin,” it said. There was an address, too, one of the cheaper hotels in the city and a phone number. He didn’t come back, but the dog did, two days later, wagging his tail. He wouldn’t eat the food she set out for him. “Traitor,” she said, thinking he must have let someone else feed him, must have let someone else wrap their arms about his neck and hold him close. She cleaned the studio. She left the sofa bed open all the time for the dog to sleep on, and she began working later hours so she wouldn’t have to come home and see just how alone she was.

She began to be scared about having a baby, about having to take care of it and raise it. She wished she could get back one of those pamphlets about adoption, about abortion. Douglas would hate her for doing either; he wouldn’t think it right. She kept walking the dog past the clinic, kept thinking how simple it would be to go in again, to have someone tell her exactly what it was she should do, and how she should go about doing it. She thought about the doctor she had seen before, how he had smiled at her, and finally, on one of her walks, she stitched up her courage and walked hesitantly toward the door.

Just as she reached it, a woman sprang up in front of her, jabbing a pamphlet at her. Robin took it automatically, reaching one hand for the door. “Read it,” the woman said, unsmiling. “You take yourself a good long look.” Robin glanced at the pamphlet. On the front was a color picture of a baby, swaddled in a bloody towel, stuffed into a trashcan. “Abortion is murder,” the woman told Robin. She lifted up one hand, perhaps to make a point, and the dog gave a sudden wild bark, making her step back, alarmed, giving Robin time to turn around and bolt.

She and the dog ran all the way home. He thought it was a game and didn’t want to stop when they finally got there, but kept frisking about her, yapping, tugging at her shorts, until she burst into tears. She sat down on the front steps. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

She stopped talking to the baby out of terror. She wouldn’t look down at her stomach, wouldn’t place her hand there. “Glad to see that habit stop,” her boss informed her. I’m seventeen, she told herself. I’m seventeen. And all the while her jeans were getting tighter and tighter, her shirts didn’t look right anymore, and at night she dreamed she was giving birth to wild animals, to insects with red, glittering eyes, insects that stung her as soon as they fluttered from her, divesting her of any motherhood she might have felt.

Sometimes she thought about calling Douglas, asking him what she should do, what was right. And, too, she missed having him in the studio. Without him, there didn’t seem to be a good enough reason to sweep the dust from the corners, to clean the grease from a plate. She showed up at the school one day, but when she saw him walking out, he was taking the arm of a woman who was old enough to be a teacher. She had curly black hair, a green plaid dress that covered her knees, and she was telling Douglas something, leaning toward him, and he was laughing and laughing, delighted. He reached up one hand to brush at something in her hair, and Robin felt her heart cramp. She turned away.

She didn’t know when it was she started thinking about Dore again. At night sometimes she’d concoct conversations in her head where Dore would tell her exactly what to do, where Dore would hand her a palmful of green herbs that could rid her of a baby in such a way that it would seem the baby had never really been at all.

She called information and got a whole series of numbers in Boston that might be Dore’s, and then there was one the operator said she couldn’t give her because it was unlisted.

“That’s the number I need,” Robin said. She begged the operator to call Dore for her. “It’s an emergency,” she begged. “Just give her my number then,” Robin said. “Let her call me.”

The operator paused. “We’re not supposed to do that,” she said. “But then, I’ve always been a fool, so why break the pattern now? You hang on.”

Robin was startled when she heard Dore’s voice on the wire, cool, detached. “Your parents are looking for you,” Dore said. “Don’t you think you should contact them?”

Robin started crying. The dog, curled beside her, looked up expectantly and then curved himself closer to her. “I contacted you,” Robin said.

“Why?” asked Dore. “To torment me?”

“I never did that,” Robin said.

“Oh, please,” Dore said, her voice edging. “And what was that fake name? What was the spying for your mother?” She paused. “I thought we were friends,” she said. “No, that’s not right. I thought we were…more than that—that we were special.”

“If you had known who I was, you wouldn’t have talked to me,” Robin said. “I was afraid. You were the only one who listened to me, the only one who was there.”

There was silence for a moment. “I was there,” Dore said. “Sometimes I even kept the phone by the bed because I worried about you at night—I wanted to be sure to get the call if it was you. Every time I went shopping, every time I picked up a sweater, I’d think about how you would look wearing it, how it would get you to smile, how it would make us closer.” She sighed, and when she spoke again, her voice was so soft that Robin had to press the receiver close against her ear to hear. “What is it?” Dore asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I want to come there,” Robin said. “To stay with you. I could keep house for you, do errands.”

Dore laughed. “You haven’t seen my place recently, have you?”

Robin was about to blurt out that she was pregnant when Dore interrupted her. “I used to think about your living with me,” Dore said. “If you knew how I rearranged my apartment in my head, how I planned it so there’d be an extra room for you, an extra place at the table. I planned meeds for you. I made you an orphan, just so you could be my daughter, just so Nick and I could adopt you and all be together. God.”

“I could be your daughter,” Robin said.

“No,” said Dore. “All we’d be is just two outcasts from the past, that’s all. And anyway, if I were your mother, you know what I’d be doing right now? Letting you go. Pushing you out into the world on your own.”

“I’ve been out in the world,” Robin said. “And it stinks. Please. You helped me before—”

“Did I?” Dore said, surprised, thoughtful. “I guess I did. I really did, didn’t I?” She was silent again, and in the silence Robin heard another voice, a man’s voice. “You look like a girl who could use some cookies,” he said, and then his voice dropped down and Dore’s voice wove into it, and then Dore came back to the phone.

“Who was that?” asked Robin.

“Not Nick,” Dore said. “That’s all you and I have to know. He’s not Nick.”

“Are you happy?” Robin asked.

“Of all my kids, you were the only one who ever asked me questions like that,” Dore said. “I think that’s why you got to me the way you did.” She paused. “Listen, you can’t call me up anymore. It isn’t fair. It just stirs up old pain. You need to get on with your life, the same way I do, and to do that, you just have to let go of the past. You can’t keep trying to replay it, even the good parts.”

“You hate me,” Robin said.

“Who said I hate you?” Dore said. “Oh, maybe. For a little while. But then I let go of it. I forced myself to forget everything I knew or felt about you and your family. It was like going insane for a while, but I’m okay now. I have a life, I have a beginning going toward a center again. And then this call… I don’t know, it touched me, I guess, like you can’t imagine, your calling me now when you don’t have to, not really, when there’s no longer any connection for me with your family, when all this call has to do with is me.

“Oh, Lord, this is starting to hurt a little, and I really want to hang up before it starts to hurt a lot. Robin, the last thing I can do for you is tell you to go home where you belong. Call your mother. Call Nick, Robin.” There was a pause. “Isn’t that funny?” she said. “That’s the first time I ever called you by your real name. Robin,” she said, and then she hung up, gently, leaving Robin with the phone cradled in her hand, the dog, rolling away from her in his untroubled dog sleep.

Lost, lost, she thought. Every time she stepped outside the studio, she was sure she wouldn’t be able to find her way back, sure that something terrible was just waiting to happen. She tried to stay with what was familiar. The place where she worked, the streets she knew, the café down the block, so close to her apartment that she could see her whole front window from any of the tables.

She was sitting at the café one day sipping iced tea, feeding bits of her pastry to the dog, who had settled under the shade of the table. The Great Gatsby was cracked open in front of her. A man suddenly sat down opposite her, waiting. She glanced warily at him. He was older than she was, older than her father, with white hair and a blue sportcoat. “I’d like to be alone,” she said politely.

“Your parents are looking for you,” he said. “Most people would have given up after two years, but not them.” He paused for a moment. “Now, doesn’t that tell you something?”

She tensed for a moment, before she remembered to keep her face impassive, to give it the curious bland stare of a stranger caught in a misunderstanding, blameless.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” she said.

He shrugged and then pulled out a card and handed it to her. “Detective,” she said. “Well, anyone can get those printed up. I could get one for myself if I wanted.”

“Robin,” he said. “Your parents gave me pictures of you. They gave me the fingerprints taken when you were a baby because your father was worried you’d get stolen. I asked a whole lot of the right questions to trail you here.”

“That’s not my name,” she said. She held up the gold band she hadn’t been able to take from her finger. “Mrs. Douglas Nylon,” she said.

He sighed, fidgeting for something in his pocket, pulling out a stubby yellow pencil, a scrap of paper. “I’m not a cop,” he said. “As much as I’d like to, I can’t force you to go home.” He scribbled something on the paper.

He handed her the paper. “It’s your father’s new address and phone number,” he said. “So you can call if you like, at least to let him know you’re okay.” He put the pencil back in his pocket. “I’m going to tell them you’re okay. Why should they worry, right?”

Robin stood up, tugging on the dog’s leash. “You don’t even know if I’m Robin,” she said. “Do you?”

“You took the phone number,” he said, and she flushed, turning from him.

Robin sat in the muddle of the studio fingering the piece of paper the detective had given her. He must have been Leslie’s idea, she thought, her mother’s surrogate, trailing, spying, a kind of carrion bird feeding on bits of her life. She was furious with Leslie, furious with Nick, too, but for different, more confusing reasons. If he was so concerned about her, why hadn’t he ever shown it before? It was like him, too, to send a detective—to send anyone but himself. She bunched up the paper and threw it against the wall, and then, later, she got up and smoothed it out, folded it in half, like a small, closed mouth, and put it into her purse.

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

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

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