Hearts (34 page)

“Arizona,” Linda said, standing, too, still holding the platter. “The climate alone—”

“Shut up!”
Robin bellowed, and she raised the blanched fist that held the fork, over her head. “Shut up,” she said again, this time to her mother and Anthony, who had not spoken or moved at all. Her face was deeply flushed and her hair was a crackling halo of light. “Why don’t you ask
me?
” she demanded. “Why don’t you ask
me
if I want to stay?”

“I’m asking you, Robin,” Miriam said weakly.

“No, you’re not! You’re asking
him
. You never asked me
anything!
And you never called up! You’re a liar and a murderer!”

“Hey,
hey
,” Tony warned.

Linda was mesmerized. Never in all their time together, during vocal battles or battling silences, had the girl looked quite like this, so violent, so thrillingly beautiful. “Oh, Robin honey,” Linda said, and she stepped back from the table and walked slowly toward her.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Robin said in a calm, even a reasonable, voice. “I wouldn’t stay here for a hundred million dollars.” Her back was curved like an archer’s extended bow. Her eyes were clear and brilliant with intention. As Linda reached her side, the hand holding the fork came down in one swift and stabbing plunge.

Miriam screamed and Robin pulled her hand back. She looked in wonderment at the fork, and at the quivering, crumbling pastry impaled on its points.

35
They were twenty-five miles out of Glendale and Robin had not cried yet, or spoken one unsolicited word.

Linda ventured careful questions. “Shall I put the radio on? Should we stop soon to have something to eat?”

And Robin said yes automatically, without deliberation or affect.

Even back in Miriam’s house, after the stabbing of the pastry, Robin had moved in a kind of trance, and displayed almost no emotion. Linda had quickly taken charge. Miriam and Anthony were still frozen in their royal pose, obviously too stunned or confused to act. “It’s all right,” Linda told Robin. She took the girl’s arm and led her into the living room. Robin was like the victim of a street accident, a hit-and-run. There was no blood or other evidence of injury, but she seemed to be in shock, and who knew what damage was unseen.

Linda spoke clearly and loudly, as if she had to penetrate an invisible barrier. “It’s all right,” she repeated. “Nobody will make you stay. I’ll take you with me.”

“You don’t have to,” Robin muttered.

“I know that, Robin,” Linda said. “I want to.” Then she went back to the kitchen, where Anthony and Miriam huddled in their robes. “I’m sorry,” Linda said, trying to avoid Miriam’s stricken glance. “I really thought it would work out. But I guess it’s just too late. Or maybe it’s too early.”

“Could I ask you … Would you please …” Miriam began. And Linda said she would write and let her know how Robin was getting along. Then she and Robin left the house.

As she drove, Linda glanced at the girl from time to time and saw the same pale, impassive face. She was convinced now that Robin had to cry in order to avoid the greater consequences of denied grief. Linda felt a responsibility to make her cry, if necessary. But first she had to get her attention. “Robin?” she said. “Remember when you asked about my father? About how he died?”

There was no answer.

“And remember I said he died in a household accident? Well, it wasn’t because I left my skates on the stairs. And he wasn’t smoking in bed, either. He was electrocuted.”

Robin turned to look at her for the first time. “You mean in the electric chair?”

“Oh, no, no. It really
was
a household accident. Bad wiring, and he was standing in a lot of water. The basement was flooded. And I saw it happen.”

Robin was facing forward again, staring ahead at the road.

“I hated my father,” Linda said. “He used to hurt me when I was a child, and I used to wish that he would die. I
prayed
for it. But still I cried when he did.”

Robin had turned completely away, was curling up, for an escape into sleep, probably.

Linda kept driving and she began to see signs for cities in California, even though they were pretty far from the border. And there were more and more California license plates. Many of them had names or phrases instead of random letters and numbers. NICE GUY, CLASSY, LOVER, CINDI B. Well, at least they seemed to know who they were.

Robin hadn’t moved for an hour or more. She was
remarkably stubborn, but Linda was, too, and would not be swayed from her mission. Everyone has to be a mourner sometime. The very nature of human life demands that. Why did Robin think she could escape it?

Linda saw a sign for a rest area ahead, and she signaled and slowed down. It was one of those wooded places, with a few redwood tables and benches, a couple of telephones, and toilets. After so many miles of open, sun-bleached landscape, it was a real oasis. There was only one other car there, a station wagon with bicycles and a baby stroller tied to the roof rack. As Linda pulled in and parked, the family sitting at one of the tables gathered their belongings and started to leave. The children distributed their garbage among the four trash baskets, each labeled with a sign:
Thank You For Not Littering
. A beautiful and lively Irish setter was called from its hideout in the woods. When they were gone, Linda touched Robin’s shoulder. “Robin, wake up,” she said.

“Are we in California?” She rubbed her eyes.

“No, almost. I needed to rest for a while. And I wanted to show you something.”

“What?”

“Come out.” Linda opened the door and walked to the rear of the Maverick, where she waited for Robin.

“What?” Robin said again. “I don’t see anything.”

Linda opened the trunk of the car and took out the plastic mortuary box. It seemed heavier than she remembered.

“What’s that?” Robin asked.

Linda hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “It’s your father’s ashes, Robin.”

“But he didn’t smoke!” Robin said, and then her face swiftly changed and Linda knew that she understood.

“I brought them all the way from Jersey,” Linda said. “I didn’t tell you about them because … well, because I thought you were too young, that it was too morbid. But now I think it’s your right to know, to help me to scatter them.”

Robin was staring at the box. Linda might have been holding a live cobra.

“For a while I thought the location was most important, you know, somewhere peaceful and beautiful. I thought I would have to find a cliff somewhere, or a running stream. No place seemed exactly right, and I couldn’t bring myself to just leave him … them anywhere. Maybe that’s because it was wrong to keep this from you in the first place. Maybe I was waiting for an opportunity to do this with you. Should we walk into the woods a little?”

Robin was unable to answer. It was as if she were being confronted with her father’s death for the first time. The idea of ashes horrified her, although she had understood about the cremation, and clearly remembered the rush of air from the oven. Maybe you are never done with dead people. If there are ashes, perhaps there are also ghosts.

Linda was walking away, going through the trees carrying the box. Robin paused and then followed her, quickly catching up. It was sharply cooler in this shaded place, and really quiet. Robin didn’t want to think about anything, least of ail what they were about to do. Maybe
Linda was lying. Maybe there were cigars in that box, or candy. It was shaped something like a book, and it could contain anything.

Linda stopped walking suddenly, and Robin almost collided with her. “This is a good place, isn’t it?” Linda asked. “I mean, it’s cool and still here. He painted trees a lot, too.” She put her right hand on the lid of the box and tugged, but it didn’t open. She held the box in the crook of her elbow and pulled harder, but still nothing happened. She smiled at Robin. “It’s stuck, I think,” she said. She tapped the box lightly with her fist, still smiling, and then tapped it a little harder. Her mouth formed a firm, determined line as she pulled at the lid once more. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any reason … There’s no tape on it or anything. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong.”

Robin leaned against a tree and waited. She scratched off little flakes of bark and crumbled them, and she watched as Linda bent to pick up a small rock.

“This is awful,” Linda said. “The terrible thing is that
he
was so good at opening things: olive jars, peanuts, sardine cans, anything.” She clenched her teeth and hammered at the box with the rock. She looked as if she was trying to kill something.

Robin blinked at each blow. She thought of all the nicknames her father had used for her: Bobolink, Redbird, Roblet. Nobody would call her those names any more.

Linda put the box on the ground. She picked up a bigger rock and held it over her head, grunting. “Oh, God,” she said, and brought it down with force. There was a large crack in the lid’s surface now, but the box
was still closed. Linda was sweating. She sat down and leaned against a tree, holding the box in her lap. “I can’t seem to do anything right,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She stroked the lid with her fingertips and it sprang open.

“Oh,” Robin said. She leaned forward and peered inside. There was a thick, rolled plastic bag there.

“It’s like a Chinese puzzle,” Linda said. “Or a desk with a secret compartment. It just opened—like that!—when I touched it a certain way. I thought I’d have to get a screwdriver from the car, or something.” She, too, was staring at the plastic bag. Then she stood, unsteadily, taking the bag from the box. Something rattled, like beads.

Linda unrolled the bag slowly and looked into it. Robin had leaned backward and was averting her face, but not her eyes. Linda wasn’t sure what she had expected to see. She’d thought of the fat, substantial ashes left by cigars, and of the ashes in a fireplace after a good fire, the residue that can be swept with a broom until it disappears. But the contents of the bag hardly looked like ashes at all. They were a grayish yellow, and were like pieces of fallen plaster or chipped paint. And they clattered against each other, making an unexpected noise. For the briefest moment she imagined that she had been given the wrong box—through some incredible mix-up or hoax. Then she knew what it was she was holding. These were bits of bone, of
Wright’s
bones, mortal relics impervious even to fire. The knowledge seemed to travel through her own marrow and then explode into her bloodstream. Robin—she had almost forgotten her—was hugging the tree, and waiting. There were no tears, only an expression of genuine terror.

Linda felt light, as if she had entered another atmosphere in which she’d become weightless. She cleared her throat. “I guess we should begin,” she said. “I’ll say something first, a kind of prayer or eulogy, you know, to mark the occasion. Then you can, too, if you want to.” She cleared her throat again. “We have stopped here in the woods in … 
near
Quartzsite, Arizona, to say farewell to Wright Henry Reismann, dear husband and father, who has left this life … He was a good man … and we will remember him.” Linda tipped the plastic bag and began to shake out its contents. She was grateful for the soft floor of pine needles that took the ashes so quietly. “Robin?” she said.

But Robin still held the tree and did not say anything.

Linda walked around a little, shaking the bag gently until it was empty. Then she put her arm around Robin’s shoulders and drew her away. They walked back through the woods to the rest area, where two other families had now stopped to eat at the picnic tables. A little girl held a sandwich in one hand and waved with the other. Linda waved back. She realized she was still holding the plastic bag. “Just a minute,” she said to Robin, and she walked to one of the trash baskets and threw it in.

36
A candle flickered between them on the table, while the waitress intoned the specialties of the day. “Chicken Cordon Bleu, Sole Amandine, Veal Marsala.” She might have been a train conductor in a foreign country, calling out the strange names of the stations.

They ordered steak. After the waitress left, Linda said, “I felt we should splurge tonight, the last night, so to speak, in our old life.”

Robin sipped water and crushed an ice cube between her teeth.

“We’re practically there, you know, and I’m so excited. Can you imagine the pioneers? Although they couldn’t tell when they crossed into another state, could they? I think the land ought to look more like it does on the map. When I was a child, Robin, I actually thought it did, the colors and all, and the little broken lines.”

“Could I have a Seven-Up?” Robin asked.

“Sure. Of course. You can have anything you like. Should we go all out and order the onion rings? And the garlic bread?”

By the time the waitress came with their steaks, Robin had finished all the bread in the basket, and the water and ice in both glasses. She’d been to the salad bar twice, once illegally. She seemed to be eating with the same manic appetite that was driving Linda to talk.

“Here we go,” the waitress said. “Green flag’s for medium, blue one’s well-done. Sour cream for the potatoes, and ketchup if you need it. Enjoy your dinner, ladies.”

“Everything looks lovely,” Linda told her. “Thank you very much.” She pulled the green paper flag from
her steak and picked up her knife and fork. Then she put them down again. “Before we left New Jersey,” she said, “I did a little research. I went to the library and looked California up in the encyclopedia. And there were some books and magazine articles, too. Do you know what I found out?”

Robin was putting both butter and sour cream on her baked potato. Her steak was covered with ketchup. She had washed her hands before dinner, but Linda saw that she still wore little wristlets of dirt. In the candlelight, she could have been twelve or thirty-seven.

“Well, for one thing,” Linda said, “there are more cars per capita in Los Angeles than in any other large American city. And the supermarkets are open twenty-four hours a day. If you feel like having a snack in the middle of the night, you just go out and get it. And they have drive-in churches! There was a picture in one of the magazines. They put these little speakers in your car, the way they do at a drive-in movie, and you can listen to the sermon without getting out. And Disneyland! It’s the most popular tourist attraction in the whole country!”