Hearts (7 page)

On April 11, Lapozzi had an address.

Linda threw it all out, after she’d reduced to shreds everything shreddable: note, photos, postcard, everything. But first she’d copied the address onto a scrap of paper, without knowing why she did it. She wondered if Wright
had acted on the report, had tried to contact his wife and beg her to come back to him and his child. It was something she’d never know.

Robin’s friends were leaving. Linda poked her head out and said, “Bye, bye!” Robin saw her look at the lamp sculpture Ray was carting off, with a mixture of bewilderment and pain.

9
They were a few miles out of Jacksonville, Pennsylvania, when Linda realized she might be pregnant. “Oh!” she said, and the car swerved, almost changing lanes before she righted it.

“Whuzzat?” Robin sat up in the back seat, jolted from a nap.

“Nothing,” Linda told her. “Just a little bump in the road,” and Robin lay down again. Then Linda’s memory gathered the clues to her revelation. The nausea she had blamed on the anxiety of driving, the sudden sleepy peace of late afternoons, and the pressing knowledge that would not rise into her consciousness on the morning of Wright’s funeral, or any time since, until now. It was something only her body knew, and wasn’t broadcasting.

Her periods had always been irregular. It wasn’t unusual for her to skip one or even two months. Since her late teens, Linda had kept a careful record of her own cycle, but in the turmoil of the past weeks she’d forgotten about it. When was her last period? She hadn’t been careless about contraception, though, and she tried to recall a magazine chart that evaluated the success rate of different methods. Wasn’t an IUD right up there with the best of them?

A doctor she’d consulted when she was twenty prescribed birth-control pills to establish an artificial regularity her system might adopt. But she began to throw up and have violent headaches, and the pills were discontinued. She remembered how the doctor said not to worry, it would probably straighten itself out in a few years and that her only problem might be in conceiving a baby, since it would be difficult to pinpoint ovulation. Had ovulation somehow been pinpointed, without her knowledge or her consent?

For the first time, Linda found herself driving without thinking about driving, without that fierce concentration that left her hands almost arthritically cramped when she stopped to rest. She knew she had better pay attention or they’d wander onto Highway 144; she had recently seen signs warning of its impending junction with I-80. And pretty soon she’d have to start looking for a motel for the night. One with a drugstore close by.

Of course she might be mistaken; she wasn’t
married
any more, wasn’t even sleeping with anybody. Just yesterday she had contemplated Wright’s paintings in terms of his immortality, and now there might be this other, further proof that he’d been here, and recently. Please, don’t let it be, she thought, and I promise I’ll be good. Although she had no idea in what direction sacrificial goodness lay.

Robin didn’t wake up again until they pulled in at the office of the Dutchboy Motel. As Linda had guessed, the rates were reasonable, and they had a vacancy. The place was close to the main road, and it didn’t have a restaurant or a coffee shop. It had a look of slight disrepair—the V and N weren’t lit on the vacancy sign—but small things like that probably held the price down.

Once inside their room, Linda knew that other factors contributed to the low rates, too. The room was tiny, and except for a mammoth color television set, the furniture seemed scaled to children or dwarfs. Well, thank goodness for the television set, anyway. It would give Robin something to do, and introduce the variety of other human voices. She offered the girl first choice of beds, although they were exactly the same. Linda lay back on hers and massaged her hands. They were still curled from steering, and looked like the hands of Snow
White’s stepmother when she was cackling over the poisoned apple. In the other bed, Snow White herself lay, pale and bored.

Robin was very upset, but with her gift for self-control, Linda would never know about it. It hadn’t occurred to Robin that they would have to share a room on the road. Now she was worried about having to undress in front of Linda. She would sleep in her clothes, if necessary. But she supposed she could use the bathroom or do it under the covers, and she hoped Linda would do the same. Robin’s other fear was that she might talk in her sleep and give away secret thoughts. Once, when Ginger slept over, she said that Robin had not shut up all night. “What did I say?” Robin asked anxiously, and Ginger only smiled and said, “Oh, lots of things. Wouldn’t you like to know?” Of course, she was well known for her lying and exaggerating.

She could feel Linda’s eyes on her. Linda was
always
looking at her and talking at her, even in the car, pointing out everything as if Robin had never seen a tree or a cow before. And she was such a rotten driver. A few times, Robin was sure they were going to be killed. Linda sighed and Robin knew she was about to speak again. She often gave little warnings like that: sighs, throat clearing, an introductory cough.

“Are you hungry?”

Robin shrugged.

“Me, too,” Linda said. “Let’s wash up and find a nice place for supper.”

In the tiny bathroom, Linda shut her eyes as she sat down on the toilet. “Please,” she whispered, but
when she opened her eyes again, her peach-colored bikini panties were still unsoiled.

In the diner, they sat in a booth that had an individual selector of taped music mounted to the wall. Robin kept turning the wheel that flipped the song titles, click, click, until Linda wanted to grab her hand to make her stop. Linda’s need to talk, so as not to have to think about herself, was enormous. Questions demanded answers, and she was determined to provoke some of them and begin a volley of conversation. “Have you ever stayed on a farm before, Robin?” she asked.

“No.”

“I haven’t either,” Linda confessed, “but it sounds nice and healthy, doesn’t it?”

That was definitely a wrong move. She could tell by Robin’s little curling sneer. Health is of no interest to teenagers, anyway. Most of the time they seem bent on
destroying
their health. Right now, Robin was eating a meal almost entirely composed of starches: spaghetti, french fries, and a buttered soft roll. An accompanying salad lay untouched. Well, she wouldn’t compound her error by saying anything about that. She wasn’t the girl’s mother, she wasn’t anyone’s mother. “Ohhhh,” she moaned, remembering, and Robin was so startled she said, “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know,” Linda said. “I guess I must be full.” She looked down at her plate, at the revolting pink edge of her half-eaten hamburger.

Linda excused herself to go to the bathroom. As soon as she left the table, Robin went right to the local telephone books on a stand near the rest rooms. She turned quickly to the R’s: Reich, Reilly, Reinhart. But
there was no Miriam Reismann listed. She slammed the book shut and hurried back to the booth as Linda came through the door marked with the silhouette of a woman.

They walked a short distance to a small shopping center that reminded Linda of the one in Slatesville. She pointed out the five-and-dime next door to the drugstore, and she gave Robin two dollars in case she wanted to buy something. But Robin trailed just behind her into the drugstore.

There was a lot of junk on the counters, but not what Linda wanted. “Look at this!” she cried, at a display of soap miniatures she hoped would distract Robin while she made discreet inquiries. Robin ignored the soaps and tailed Linda as if she were suddenly scared of being separated. Linda pretended to browse. She even took off her shoes and tried on six pairs of those Japanese rubber beach thongs. The Child’s Large, the Man’s Small, and the Woman’s Medium all fit her. The pharmacist called from behind his counter: “May I help someone?” Linda looked around; they were the only customers in the store. She fixed a smile and ambled up to him, sensing Robin right behind her.

Linda thought that if she were a shy young man buying condoms for the first time, there would probably have been a forbidding matron, the twin of her high-school health teacher, behind the counter.

The pharmacist wore a pristine white coat, and he had gray hair parted in the middle, giving him a paternal/professional aura that confused her. She felt she wanted his approval, which didn’t make any sense. He was a complete stranger; she would never see him again.
Linda leaned toward him, clutching the counter’s edge. She had removed her wedding band on the day of Wright’s funeral, and now she wondered if she should be wearing it, the way women used to wear borrowed or dime-store rings when they checked into quickie motels.

Behind her, Robin had paused at a magazine rack against the wall, and was standing there, turning pages.

“Do you have those pregnancy-test kits?” Linda hissed.

The pharmacist reached between them and handed her a small blue box from a prominent pile of small blue boxes. They had been right there all the time, in plain sight, under a sign that said
Family Planning Center
. And the pharmacist didn’t even seem curious. She might have asked for aspirin or Band-Aids for all he cared. His indifference gave her a rush of courage. She paid for her purchase and marched away, forgetting completely about Robin for the moment. At the doorway, she remembered and turned to see Robin buying something, too. Linda waited for her with concealed impatience.

The kid stayed in the bathroom for what seemed like hours. What was she doing in there? As soon as the door was shut, Linda had pulled the blue box from her purse and scanned the instructions. They were not complicated at all. How civilized life had become when such torturous suspense could be shortened, and when no middleman was necessary to obtain this internal information.

According to the literature, she’d have her answer in two hours. If Robin ever came out of the bathroom. The
toilet flushed once, then again; water ran into the sink for the millionth time, and the door opened. Robin, in blue pajamas, was barefoot and pink-faced. Linda rushed past her, closed the door, and locked it.

Robin dropped her discarded clothing on the floor next to the bed that was hers for the night. If she woke first in the morning, which was her intention, she would probably have everything back on again before Linda even stirred. The tattooed place on her back was tender when she lay on it. It was probably still infected. The antibiotic capsules Ray had given her were huge, and she’d always had trouble swallowing pills. When she was little and became ill, her father would crush the baby aspirins and hide them in applesauce.

Asshole Linda had knocked on the door, asking if everything was okay, just when she almost had it down, and she had to spit it out and start all over again. Her belly was bloated with all the water she drank, trying. The capsule kept rising into her mouth no matter how far back she pushed it, no matter how fast she gulped the water. She turned both faucets on all the way so Linda wouldn’t hear her gagging. Robin had to throw two capsules down the toilet because they had become such a gelatinous mess. The third one went down her throat on the first try.

After that, she took two short tokes on one of the joints Ray had given her, and then carefully put it out. She opened the window and waved at the smoke while Linda kept banging on the door.

Now Robin pulled the covers up and lay on her side to think about her mother. Once Robin learned about the man, she had to give up all those soothing fantasies
of amnesia and kidnapping by pirates or gypsies. Gradually, since her father’s death, her mind’s image of her mother changed, too. The beauty she believed she remembered became shallow and ordinary. Yet Robin clung to an old idea that the man in the case was handsome and rich, maybe even famous. One day Robin might open a newspaper and find her mother in the act of dining at the White House or attending the Academy Awards. She could only think of Miriam in extravagant circumstances, wealthy in every respect except for peace of mind and true happiness. All the furs and jewels in the world were unable to console her in her regret. And she would be almost unrecognizable now because of the rapid and savage aging process that had left her ruined and undesirable.

When Robin found her, truly ugly and deserted by
him
, she would tell her how Wright had died. Her mother would cry out in grief and lay apologies like roses at Robin’s feet, too late, too late. Then joy would overtake her at rediscovering her lost child and she would open her arms. Robin would go into them, but only to exact her revenge. Then all of Miriam’s money, and the horrified screams of her servants, couldn’t save her.

The pot was finally starting to take. Robin felt good now, easy. Her thoughts became random and before long she allowed herself to dissolve into sleep. What! She jerked awake and sat up, confused. She was in a dim room, lighted briefly by passing cars. It was a motel room, somewhere in Pennsylvania. Linda was in the bathroom doing something in absolute silence, and Robin’s father was dead.

She lay down again and under the covers her hands came together between her thighs in irreverent prayer.
She clenched her teeth until they ground against each other, forbidding the escape of careless speech, and then she gave herself up again to sleep.

There were two glasses on the shelf above the sink. Linda took the one still wrapped in a bag marked
Sanitized For Your Protection
, unwrapped it, and urinated into it. The diagrammed instructions were unfolded and propped against the faucet. After she glanced at them once more, she took an eyedropper from the kit and put just three drops of urine into the provided test tube. Soon this magical fluid from her own body would reveal its mystery.

She removed a plastic vial from the kit and added its contents to the test tube and then shook it. There was a little stand in the box and she placed it on the edge of the sink and balanced the test tube in it. A mad scientist in the bathroom laboratory of a third-rate motel.

Linda stared as the frothy liquid settled and grew still. If a dark ring formed near the bottom in two hours, the test was positive and she was pregnant. If nothing happened, she was not. It was nine o’clock. At eleven, the results would be in. Watched pots. She couldn’t simply sit in that claustrophobic space and wait. Linda wished she had someone there to share the time and suspense with. She thought of Iola back in Bayonne shaking her hips right now to amplified music.