SIXTEEN

Nick never expected Robin to appear. When he thought of her, he thought of a phone call in the small hours of the night, and the voice he heard was always the detective’s, not hers, telling him where she was, how she was, and where she was going. She wouldn’t want to see him. At first, when Clarkson was narrowing her whereabouts down from state to state, Nick had planned to go down there. He thought he could charm her back to him by making dinner reservations for two, by sending her tickets to the ballet and showing up himself. But she was never in one state for very long, according to the detective, and then, when he thought about the reservations, he began to think of himself waiting for her at an empty table while his stomach kicked and growled. He saw himself watching a ballet with an empty seat beside him, not letting anyone from the cheaper seats move down into it, even during the last ten minutes, because there was still a chance she might show up. He always thought of seeing her, but he never thought of it as long-term—he never thought he had the right. He’d take her to dinner and then put her on a plane back to Leslie, back where she belonged.

He sometimes wrote letters to her, but he didn’t really know what to say to her, and he didn’t know where to mail them, and it usually ended up making him feel that much more alone.

His one comfort was Madison. He was surprised at the way he was falling in love with the town, the way he was beginning to feel as if he had finally found the place where he belonged. He loved the muggy, still heat of the summer; the bats by the capitol dome and in his attic; the foamy detergent frothing at the edge of one of the lakes. He knew his neighbors and they liked him well enough to invite him to dinner, to come by with tins of home-baked chocolate cookies or potted red geraniums for his windows because they looked too bare. He was kidded about being fixed up, he was told about four sisters, each of them prettier than the next, but no one pushed, no one asked about the photographs of three different women in his house, and when he got strange and silent, they let him be.

The bookstore, too, gave him more pleasure than he could have imagined. Jack, who had been threatening to retire for years, finally decided enough might be enough. He was going to get a couple of dogs, maybe a cat, and just stay home. He told Nick not to worry, that his job was as secure as any man could ever hope for, and that the new owner was a man he’d respect as much as Jack did. “I’ll be around to visit,” Jack told him. The day he left, Nick took him out to dinner at L’Héritage, an expensive new French restaurant, and when he handed Jack his present, a leather-bound blank book, Jack handed him a sealed white envelope. “What’s this, my walking papers?” Nick asked, and then he unfolded the paper and saw that the shop had been deeded over to him. “Who else was I going to leave it to?” Jack said. “My cat?”

Nick closed the shop for two weeks so he could take down all the books, dust the shelves, and put things in the order he wanted. He bought a few cheap, comfortable chairs so people could sit down and read if they wanted. He bought a small stereo so he could play Vivaldi and Bach while people browsed. He turned it on as soon as he opened the shop mornings, flooding the rooms with sound, stopping his routine to conduct or to just stand still and listen to some passage of eerie beauty. He didn’t change the name of the shop, and he didn’t do anything to the floors or the walls other than to rewax and repaint. And only sometimes at night did he wake, panicking, realizing that he owned something named for a woman who had been more loved than most people could even imagine; that he loved the shop, too, and that now it had a claim on him: Now he would have to stay in one place—he couldn’t run.

He was home from work, exhausted, wanting only to make himself some supper and go to sleep, when the bell rang. He smoothed down the rumples in his shirt, and then he opened the door, and there was Robin, her skin yellow, a big, dirty-looking dog growling beside her.

“I’m pregnant,” she said defiantly.

He made her come inside; he backed away from her, half-afraid that if he turned for one moment, she might disappear again. He wanted to touch her, to grasp her to him, but when he moved, she flinched.

He made her sit on the couch, but she wouldn’t tell him where she had been, by whom she was pregnant, or how she had found him. He felt a quick buckling of irritation at the detective, who should have known, who should have called.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“I know how I look,” she said.

He stooped down toward her. He wanted to place his forehead against hers to see if she had fever, the way he used to watch Leslie do so many times when Robin was little. Later, when Robin was older, when she insisted on a thermometer because it was more adult, he had seen what that had done to Leslie’s face. She’d go and get it, but not before she dipped down and felt her daughter’s head anyway, pretending to be very clinical about it. It was as much of a hug as Robin allowed in those days, so Leslie was always feeling her head, as much as she could get away with.

Nick hesitated, then put his hand out and touched Robin’s forehead. “Hot,” he said.

He brought her herb tea. “Listen, we’ve got to get you well first,” he said.

She blinked at him. “First?” she asked, but she slumped back against the couch, and after a time she slept.

He sat by her, just watching, just making sure she was really there, and when she woke up, she seemed dazed. She kept looking around.

He fixed up the spare room for her. He made her a supper she barely touched. Sometimes the mad flutter of the bats trapped in the attic above her would wake her and he’d make a show of getting the broom and going upstairs to swat at them, but he never really did, because he knew it would just make them crazier. He’d stand outside the small musty attic for a few minutes and bang the broom around, just loud enough so Robin could hear it. When he came downstairs, she lifted herself up on one elbow and sleepily thanked him. Later, he took the broom and went up to the attic again, just so he could come back down and collect the look washing across her face.

She was asleep for the night when he called Leslie to tell her Robin was really there, Robin was really okay. “I can catch the next plane,” Leslie said, and he felt himself brighten, but then she stopped herself. “Oh, God, who am I kidding?” she said. “She’d hate that. If she knew I was coming, she’d be gone before I even got there.” Leslie sighed. “Listen, will you tell her for me that I love her? Tell her you called me, and tell her…tell her it’s okay if she doesn’t want to call me back right now.”

“It’s not okay,” Nick said.

“Tell her anyway,” Leslie said.

She wanted to know how Robin was, where she had been—all the details that Nick didn’t know. He told her Robin would probably open up once she felt a little better, and that he would call the detective. He didn’t tell her Robin was pregnant.

“I’d love to see you,” Nick said, but when Leslie spoke, her voice was bitter.

“Do you think for one moment that I would be calling you if it weren’t for Robin?” Leslie said. “I want her home, but I wish what happened with Robin would happen to you. I wish you would disappear. I wish you would stop being real.”

“I loved you,” Nick said. “I love you.”

“What do you know about it?” Leslie said, and then she hung up.

Nick sat down. It wasn’t over with her. Not yet. She’d call him as long as Robin was here. He was the bridge she needed to travel to get to her daughter. It might still be all right.

He went to check on Robin, who was still sleeping, and then he came back into the kitchen, made himself coffee, and sat down to think. He wanted to call Dore. He had had her number for a while now. The detective had jotted it down when he had gone to ask her questions about Robin, and he had passed it along to Nick, whose sole reason for not dialing it the second it was in his hands was knowing just how much Dore would resent him for intruding upon her, for spying. But it was different now. Robin was here with him. And he somehow wanted Dore to know that. As soon as she answered, he said, “Robin’s here, she’s fine,” so she wouldn’t hang up on him.

“She’s safe then,” Dore said, relieved,

“Would you like to see her?” Nick asked.

Dore was silent for a moment. “That’s not very fair,” she said. “You think that I wouldn’t? That I wouldn’t mind seeing you, either? What I want and what I’m going to do are two different things.” She was silent again.

“You could come anytime,” Nick said. “You could risk it.”

“You know how some people believe in reincarnation?” Dore said. “Some of my kids do. They have all these crazy Edgar Cayce books and they try to hypnotize each other in study hall so they can get back into whatever past lives they’re sure they’ve had.” She laughed, and Nick laughed, too.

“Well,” she said, “sometimes I feel as though I’ve been reincarnated three times just in this one stupid life—that I’ve had three lives, all of them different, and all of them defined by you. One before I met you; one when we were living in the trailer, when we were happy; and now I’m starting my third life, without you. And you can’t mesh different lives—that’s how come people supposedly forget who they were in the past. It’s a safety valve, it protects you.”

“Dore,” Nick said, “we’re not talking about kids’ theories—”

“I know what we’re talking about,” Dore said. “And it hurts. I don’t know how you got my number, but please, please, don’t call anymore. I’m glad you called about Robin, because I would have worried, but I don’t want to hear any more about you. I’m in another life now. I’m getting as happy as I can again.”

“My phone number is 608-775-6681. Madison, Wisconsin,” Nick said.

“Goodbye, Nick,” she said, very gently, and she hung up.

He felt lost in the sudden still of the house, and he automatically picked up the receiver and dialed Rory Clarkson. He told the detective that Robin has shown up at his doorstep. Clarkson didn’t seem surprised. He said he’d found her two days ago and decided to give her a few days to go home on her own. He’d had a hunch she would, seeing how things were with her.

“What things?” Nick asked.

Clarkson said he’d found Robin in California, living with her old science teacher, a man named Douglas Nylon. The two had split up and she was clearly scared. “I gave her your number, and she took it.”

“You should have called me the second you saw her. You should have let me know,” Nick said. “What the hell kind of a detective are you?”

“I guess not yours any longer,” Clarkson said. He told Nick he’d mail out the report right away, and if Nick ever needed him again, he knew how to get in touch.

“I won’t need you,” Nick said.

He felt empty. He went to sit down beside Robin. She was here, but she wasn’t, not really, and he had this overwhelming feeling that he had lost everything he possibly could. He reached out and took Robin’s hand, and she woke, startled. She roughly pulled her hand from his. He didn’t care. He reached for her hand again; he told her how glad he was that she was there.

“Why?” she asked.

“How about love for a reason?”

She sat up, kicking the blanket from her. “As soon as I’m okay, I’m leaving,” she said, her eyes serious.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll help you get well.”

She didn’t talk to him much. Not at first. She never berated him for hiring a detective to follow her; she never asked if he was calling Leslie with news of her, if he had called Dore. And because of that, he in turn never approached her with what he knew about her running away, her California life. He gave her her secrecy, her distance, out of a kind of respect, and, too, because he didn’t feel he had any right to pry.

She was suspicious about him. She stiffened when the phone rang. When the paperboy came to the door, she went into a back room. She couldn’t help going through the mail, sifting through Nick’s bills and sweepstakes offers, peering anxiously at the names she didn’t know.

When she finally approached him about helping her find a free clinic because she needed to do something about the baby, he shook his head. “We’ll get you a private doctor,” he said.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” she said, so seriously he almost laughed.

“I do,” he said.

She dug her hands into the pockets of her jeans, swaying on the heels of her sneakers, and then suddenly she started to cry. “I don’t want to have this baby,” she said. “I do and I don’t. I do and I can’t,” she said, and this time, when he touched her, she let herself lean against him.

“I know how it is,” he told her, and then she pulled away, averting her face.

At night he sat up, just listening to her soft prowling about her room, the scrape of furniture being moved, the opening and closing of the sticking drawers. He kept thinking about her. She couldn’t sleep either. It would be easy enough to walk past her room on some pretext, needing water, wanting a cool shower because the house was so hot. He could knock on her door and tell her he was making iced coffee and would she like some? He could knock just because he was her father. He sat up straighter in bed, but he didn’t get up. He kept thinking, thinking. His baby having a baby. His baby losing a baby, choosing to lose it. It made him half-mad, and sometimes, very late at night, just before the sun shimmered into the sky, it made him see Susan, reborn in the shadows just under his door, always disappearing into mist as soon as he stretched out his hand.

He thought about Robin’s California life. He tried to piece it together. What the hell kind of a man was this Douglas Nylon, leaving Robin to struggle with this on her own? What the hell kind of father? He felt like phoning him and yelling. He thought of all the ways you could harm someone—the curses, the mad violence you might do. He could see him in jail if he wanted to put Robin through that, if he wanted to risk her running away. And then he thought, well, who was he to talk? Who was he to judge anyone?

He never slept until the noises from Robin’s room stopped, and even then he drifted, and in the morning, when the alarm bolted him awake, he sometimes felt as if he were still dreaming.

It took him only two days to set up an appointment with a doctor for Robin. He thought a woman might make her more comfortable, but he didn’t know whom to get, whom to even ask for referrals. He didn’t want to tell his daughter’s business to his neighbors or his staff; he didn’t want her to feel her privacy was invaded. So he went to the library one morning while Robin slept and he leafed through the reference books on doctors. He picked out the ones affiliated with hospitals, the ones who had gone to the best schools, the ones who were young. When he finally narrowed his choice to Elizabeth Nagle, it wasn’t just because of her credentials, but because she listed that she coached tennis, and it reminded him of Leslie’s mother, and he saw it as a good omen.

He drove Robin to Dr. Nagle’s office for her first visit, prepared for a battle about his coming into the waiting room with her. But she didn’t fight him. She stood outside in the sun, scared, blinking, waiting for him to follow.

He felt funny in the waiting room. It was painted bright pink, and taped all over the walls were crayoned drawings by children, self-portraits that an adult hand had carefully signed each child’s name to. There were other women in the room: one swelling with child, her hands folded over her stomach; another woman, long and lean, nipping kisses at the man seated beside her. Everyone looked up at Nick and Robin. Robin, in blue jeans and dirty white sneakers, selfconsciously flinched down into one of the red leatherette chairs.

It didn’t take long. Elizabeth Nagle came out herself to greet each patient, her pale brown hair in a lank ponytail, a white doctor’s coat thrown over a brilliant red jumpsuit. She called Robin Mrs. Nylon, which made Robin start. Dr. Nagle acted as if having a pregnant seventeen-year-old in her office was perfectly normal, and when Robin stood up, Dr. Nagle gently placed one hand on her shoulder. “We’ll just do some talking today, do a quick exam,” the doctor said. Robin turned back to look at Nick, her eyes haunted, before she disappeared behind the door with the doctor, and it was all he could do not to get up and follow her.

She came back out fifteen minutes later, her eyes red, the doctor behind her. She wouldn’t talk to him in the car; she kept looking down at her hands, lifting them to bite her nails. She wouldn’t tell him anything. He stopped at the first Dairy Queen he saw, telling her that he didn’t know about her, but he certainly needed one. But when he came back carrying two chocolate double-dipped cones, she took one look at them and started crying. He didn’t know what to do with the ice cream; he hadn’t really wanted one anyway, so he just dropped them into the trashcan and got back into the car and sat beside her.

“It’s alive and I can’t have it,” she cried, and then abruptly drew herself up. “Millions of girls have abortions,” she said stiffly. She started talking about how simple a procedure it was—it could be done right in the office. He’d have to come with her, though, because she might need help getting home.

“Of course I will,” he said.

“You hate me,” she said. “You think I’m disgusting.” Her voice was so flat, he turned to stare at her, astounded.

“That’s what you’re supposed to think about me,” he said, and then she looked at him for a moment before turning toward the window, lifting her face up to the breeze.

She was told not to eat, and to count on spending some time at the doctor’s office, one hour just lying down so she could be monitored after the procedure. The appointment was in the morning, and she dressed up for it, in a new blue dress, in black heels she could barely walk in, her hair twisted into a knot and fastened with a silver clip. Nick, in blue jeans and an old black sweater, not wanting to take the time to shave that morning, felt grubby beside her. “You look very lovely,” he told her.

“I just want to look old,” she said.

Nick sat in the empty waiting room and tried not to think about what was happening to Robin. He thought about birth. He remembered Dore telling him how her mother had given birth to her one sulky, shiny, hot summer day while her father was at a baseball game, and even though they had had him paged, he hadn’t shown up at the hospital until late that evening, when Dore’s mother was asleep. He remembered Leslie telling him how one time her mother, in a rage, blamed Leslie’s birth for the athritis that robbed her of her tennis career, and then felt so guilty she went out and bought Leslie a fresh box of Crayolas with a built-in sharpener and three new coloring books. He remembered Susan’s birth; he remembered Robin’s, how hard it had rained that day; and then he remembered Helen nuzzling his boyish hair when he was small, telling him his birth had been a privilege.

It seemed like hours before he was allowed to go in and see Robin. “She’s just fine,” Dr. Nagle told Nick. “Though I’d make sure she takes it easy this week.”

Robin was lying on an examining table, a light blue blanket over her, her hair coming undone from the silver clip, and when she saw him, she sat up. “I thought you had gone,” she said. “I kept hearing the door.”

He sat down beside her, taking her hand.

“I kept thinking and thinking,” Robin said. “The whole time they were doing it, I kept thinking how I’d have to get myself up and get on the road and start hitching someplace, only I didn’t know where else I could go anymore, who I could go to.” She lay back against the pillow. “I’m no child of danger anymore, am I?” she said.

“Who wants you to be?” said Nick.

He sat with her that hour, while a nurse whisked in and out, cuffing Robin’s forearm for pressure, bringing her something red and sweet to sip, and then eventually he helped Robin get up, he had her lean on him.

The dog was crazy at the door when he spotted Robin. He had chewed up three books and the toes of Nick’s favorite cowboy boots, but rather than being the least bit ashamed, he had left his damage in the center of the living room. “It’s lobotomy time for dogs,” Nick warned, but the dog cheerfully ignored him and wagged his tail at Robin. “You good boy,” she said.

He set Robin up on the couch downstairs because she said she didn’t want to feel isolated. He rolled in the small black-and-white TV so she could watch the old movies that ran through the afternoons. He set up a small bookcase for her, filled with new books from his store. She wasn’t supposed to be in bed very long. He knew some women who had an abortion in the morning and went to a film that evening, but Robin stayed prone on the couch for three days, and then four, until he began to worry. He kept asking her if she was all right, if he should drive her back to the doctor’s. “I’m fine,” she said, but she didn’t get up, she just lay back against the pillows, staring moodily out at the night, her hands on her belly.

He began noticing how tense she sometimes got when he went out to the back with the plastic bags of garbage, when he went upstairs to shower; how she didn’t seem to relax until he was back in the room with her. Sometimes her eyes were red and she’d shield them with one hand and blame it on all the books she was reading. He had the groceries delivered and tried to run his bookshop by phone, always promising to be in the next day.

In the evening, he let the dog out into the backyard. It was fenced with white picket, and the dog could run wildly without bothering the neighbors. Nick made grilled cheese sandwiches for Robin and himself, and they ate together. He waited for her to talk to him, but she was silent. After a while her silence began to make him uncomfortable, so he began to talk.

At first he thought he was just going to tell her some stories, the way he had when she was little. He thought he’d talk about the shop, about growing up in the home, maybe tell her how he had met Leslie, how he remembered her as a baby. He didn’t know what it was—maybe the strangeness of having his daughter in the house with him, without Leslie, without Dore in the distance. Maybe it was just Robin’s stubborn refusal to reveal her own life that made him want to reveal his.

He found himself talking. At first about places—about his first year in New York City, his slanted, grimy floor, the roaches, the way he used to like to sit out on his fire escape nights with a book and a transistor radio and a bottle of wine because he thought it was such a New York City thing to do, because for a moment, before he remembered who and what he was, it made him feel he belonged to the city, that it was all right for him to be there.

He told her how he used to sit on the steps of the Forty-second Street library at lunchtime amid the throngs, just hoping to meet someone. Sometimes on the streets he’d pretend to be lost so he could stop the first friendly face he saw and ask directions, make some contact. He told Robin how he had once lied on the subway, how he had told this perfectly nice old woman that his young wife had died in a farm accident and he had moved from Iowa to New York chiefly because there wasn’t a chance of seeing a cornfield there. The woman had told him that it was all right. “My own husband ran off with my best friend when I was twenty-three years old. I was crazy in love, and I’d told my best friend every secret, everything. That, to me, is worse.”

He told Robin about the trailer park—what it was like to live in a home that swayed when it got too windy, where you could hear the sounds of a family fight from halfway down the block.

Robin never took her eyes from him while he talked, and she began asking questions. But then the dog started barking, wanting to be let in, and Nick had to get up.

In all, Robin was on the couch for a week, and each night, he’d let the dog out, serve her a dinner she rarely did more than pick at, and then tell her stories. He told her about Leslie—how he had met her, how she had worried that Robin as a baby didn’t like her.

“She worried about that?” Robin asked.

“Well, you weren’t a cuddly baby with her,” Nick said. “She took it personally.”

And then he began talking about Dore—how he had met her that day in the school hall, how she had been his first love, his first friend, his first everything. He stopped, yearning back toward the past, when everything was possible.

“I know the Susan story,” Robin said, her voice low. “Dore told it to me.”

He looked over at her. “Well, now I’ll tell you,” he said. “It’s my story to tell, too.”

He told her about Susan, about a baby so beautiful that people would stop him just to take a look at her, a baby so precious he had to interview twenty girls before he found one he could trust to babysit. “She was me,” he said, and then he told how he was robbed of his daughter by a thing as simple as a single breath; how in a way it had robbed him of Dore, too. “I used to watch you sleep,” he told Robin. “And every breath you took just made me worry about the next.”

“You left me to go back to Dore,” Robin said. “I saw you. I hitched to Boston to surprise you, to be with you. I had it figured out how happy you’d be to see me, where we’d go for dinner.” She sat up. “I saw you.”

“It had nothing to do with how I felt about you,” Nick said.

“How did you feel about me?” she cried. “You tell me how. You were with Dore and I was home with Leslie, and you were leaving us both, you were leaving me.”

“Who told you that?” he said. “If I were with Dore, or by myself for the rest of my life, I’d still never leave you. I’d make sure I saw you, that I spent time with you—”

“You were never with me!” Robin cried. “You were on the road, you were at the office, you were anywhere and everywhere except with me!” She was furious. “Leslie will never take you back,” she said. “Dore won’t either.”

For a moment, Nick felt something giving way inside of him, and then he sat up a little straighter. “I know what I have and what I don’t have,” he said. “You don’t have to do any reminding.”

She sighed, some of the anger leaving her, making her body looser.

“You know what?” Nick said. “Any minute, you could leave me, too. Don’t think I don’t know that. And don’t you think I don’t love you.”

Outside, the dog was barking frantically, and Nick stood up to let him in. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said to Robin. “But tomorrow I’m going to work. I just want you to know in case you wake up late and don’t see me, that’s all.”

“So go to work,” she said.

She was sleeping when he got up the next morning. He went to open the bookshop, and every time he went to phone her, something came up: a new salesman wanting to deal directly with Nick; a wrong shipment; a customer trying to resell some books he had stolen from the shop. By the time Nick closed up, he was exhausted. He stopped at the grocery and bought a frozen pizza and two ready-made salads, forcing himself to believe she still might be home.

By the time he got to the front door, he could smell something cooking inside, he could hear the dog’s short, angry barks. She opened the door in the same blue dress she had worn to the doctor’s, a wood spoon fisted in one hand. “I made dinner,” she said. “I was bored, that’s why.” She made him sit at the table while she set down platters of cheese and bread, then brought out pasta in a strange green sauce that tasted delicious. She insisted on feeding the dog scraps from her plate.

They never discussed her staying or not staying, but every day he woke up expecting to find her gone, and every day she was there, the dog on her bed. She began showing up at the shop. He introduced her to the staff and let her sit in one of the chairs reading book after book. After a few days, Nick told her to make herself useful. He showed her how to unpack the books, how to check invoices and manage the stock. Once, he heard her talking to a customer, recommending books, and it made him smile.

He began to get used to her being in the shop. She never walked over with him, and she never showed up at the same time. She spent her lunch hour going home to walk and feed the dog, but she always came back. In the evening, she usually waited for Nick to close the shop, and then the two of them would walk home together, stopping at the Quick-Check to pick up something for dinner.

She was the only one of his whole staff who actually liked working the cash register, who didn’t feel the need to tell every person who approached her with a few dollars and a paperback that she was really a student at the university, that she was really writing a novel due out in the fall. She didn’t mind people asking her how old she was, and she wasn’t afraid to confront someone she suspected of shoplifting. One afternoon she even washed out both display windows, picking out the dead flies and dusting off each book.

At the end of her first week of work, Nick handed her a check. She was baffled. “You work, you get paid,” he said.

She blushed a little. She said he didn’t have to do that; it wasn’t as if he had really hired her. “I don’t even know how long I’ll be here,” Robin pointed out.

He said as long as she was there, she could have the job. He watched her. He was always waiting for her to leave, and every morning he was grateful to see her at his breakfast table, rubbing her eyes, stroking the dog’s rough fur.

There were pieces of her all over his house now. Pastel stockings dripping from the shower, powdered eye shadows and tubes of lipstick across her bureau. She liked heavy dime-store perfumes—Lily of the Valley, Gardenia—and because the fragrance was so strong, he could catch her scent almost as soon as she walked in. She didn’t ask permission to do anything, and the only thing she refused to do was answer the phone or the door. She’d flinch as soon as she heard the ringing; she’d go and get Nick out of the shower, or from the backyard garden. She tried to talk him into getting an answering machine; she said the great thing was you always knew who was calling and you never had to speak to anyone at all if you didn’t want to.

“I hate answering machines,” Nick said.

She drove him crazy with the phone. He’d try to call her when he knew he was going to be late, and he never could tell if she was just ignoring the rings, or had gone out to walk the dog, or if she had left and was already standing out on the highway, her thumb jabbed out, headed for nowhere he could ever find. He made up this signal for her to know that it was him calling her. Two rings, hang up, two more rings, and she was to pick up on the third.

Sometimes, though, when he was home and picked up the phone, she would stand quietly against the long white expanse of wall and listen to him. When it was just a client, she’d turn away and go upstairs. When it was Leslie, she’d stand perfectly still until Nick had hung up. He waited for her to ask something, but she never did. He’d tell her that Leslie had sent her love, that Leslie missed her, that Leslie wished Robin would call. Robin would nod and then turn away, her face hidden from him.

At dinner one night, Nick talked about Leslie. He did it casually, as he was spooning green beans onto his plate, and he watched Robin, trying to gauge her reaction.

“What do you tell her about me?” Robin asked, picking at her food. “What do you say?”

“I say you’re doing fine here. I say you seem happy. Is that wrong?”

“What else?”

“Listen,” Nick said, “your life is your life to tell or to keep secret. She knows you went to California.”

“The rest?” Robin asked. “Did you tell her the rest?”

“That’s for you to tell if you want,” Nick said. “It’s your business.”

Robin relaxed into her chair. “She hired a detective on me,” she said.

“No,” Nick said. “I did.”

Robin gave him a sharp look. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “She drove you away. She drove us both right out of the house, only I didn’t have any Dore to run to the way you did.”

Nick rested his head in his hands, rubbing at his forehead. “You think that’s what happened?” he said quietly. “You think it’s that simple? She didn’t drive anybody away, least of all me.”

“I can’t eat this dinner,” Robin said, pushing her plate away, stiffly getting up.

Robin watched the Madison teenagers sometimes, and she yearned. She wanted to be fifteen again. Really fifteen. Feeling like a kid, whispering secrets to a girlfriend or moonily smiling up at some boy she liked. She didn’t want to know anymore what it was like to live with someone like you were married to him, what it was like to have been pregnant, to have had an abortion. She didn’t want to know what it was going to be like to have an ex, how to live with a baby that was made up of nothing more than memory and pain, a baby that would never get any bigger than the small hopes it once generated, hopes that had died right along with it. And she didn’t want to know anymore how pain could amplify, how you could suddenly find out that all the roads you had ever waited and waited to travel were dusty and dirty ones, seeded with dangers you were unprepared to face.

None of it would leave her alone. She couldn’t stop thinking about the baby she had lost, about almost having been a mother. She kept away from the children’s book sections at Brini’s; she froze when a mother pushed a stroller through the door. The doctor had told her she was doing the right thing, that there could always be other babies, when she was ready, when she was prepared. And Nick, who made such a big deal about family, had supported her. She unconsciously took up her old habit of touching her belly, the way she had when she was newly pregnant and working at Arby’s, and when she realized what she was doing, she angrily jerked her hands away.

She wanted a different kind of comfort than what Nick was giving her. She dreamed about Dore holding her, rocking her as if she were six years old and everything could be healed in a hug. She remembered Dore’s hand soothing her brow; she remembered Dore before Dore had refused to see or talk to her anymore. She remembered feeling mothered.

Mothered. When she had been pregnant, she had told herself how unlike Leslie she was going to be. She had listed the ways to herself like a litany: She would never pit the baby against Douglas; she would never grow cool and then warm, but would be as constant as the stars. But when she started ticking off all the good things she would do, memories about her mother cropped up despite herself: the way Leslie had let her climb into the big bed and cuddle when she was frightened; the songs Leslie sang to her; the time Leslie taught her to drive. And then Robin’s whole mood would change. She’d find herself missing her mother; she’d feel unsure and lonely and lost to herself and to everyone.

Now Leslie’s calls softened something inside of her. She sometimes felt like taking the phone and crying; she sometimes wanted to tell Leslie about losing her baby, about losing Douglas.

But her confusion, her anger, got in her way. How did she know that Leslie wasn’t calling her just to have a good excuse to talk to Nick? Maybe Leslie was wearing down—maybe being alone in the house was making her want Nick back, no matter where his heart really was. How could she know that she wasn’t somehow being used? How could she believe that it was just herself that Leslie wanted now, herself without Nick? I’m here, not you, she thought, as if her mother were her rival.

She kept track of her mother’s calls, jealous of the way any ring of the phone would make Nick look optimistic. But she noticed that Nick never stayed on the phone with Leslie very long. He said hello, he started to tell her something, and then he was cut off. “All right,” he said flustered. “All right.” He held the phone out to Robin, and when she shook her head, stubborn, he tried to talk to Leslie again, but it was always useless. “She wants to talk to you,” Nick said. “Not to me.”

“Yeah, right,” said Robin, doubtful.

And then, one week, the phone didn’t ring at all, and she hated how deserted she suddenly felt, hated the panicky edge forming along her heart. “Well, you never want to speak with her,” Nick said. “What do you expect?”

“Nothing,” Robin said. “Suits me fine.” But she didn’t feel good at all. Not speaking to Leslie, but knowing that Leslie wanted to speak to her, was a different matter than this silence. And she knew what she expected, all right—that now that her mother didn’t seem to want Nick anymore, there was really no reason for her to want Robin, either.