Hearts (16 page)

There would be a police investigation, of course, and her underpants would probably be found in the debris and taken as evidence. Against whom? She imagined them in the trouser pocket of one of those two lounging policemen. Maybe he’d forget to turn them in—they would be so slight in the depths of his uniform pocket—and he’d find them weeks later, a silken surprise to his callused hand. Or his wife would find them … Why was she having such strange and stupid thoughts? It must be because of the injection, and the trauma.

She bathed her face and the place where she had bled, and inserted a tampon. Her teeth still clattered like castanets, and her reflection in the basin mirror was blurred by all the trembling. She brushed her hair over the wastebasket until all the glass showered down. Then she took several deep breaths, urging herself to become tranquil before she went back into the bedroom.

Robin was sitting up in bed, like an invalid, watching an old movie. “What time is it?” she asked.

Linda looked at her watch, surprised to see that it was still intact on her wrist. “Eleven o’clock,” she said. Was that all? She held it to her ear. “Eleven o’clock,” she said again, disbelieving. Why wasn’t that girl outside somewhere having fun? Linda pulled back the stubbornly tight covers on her bed and climbed into it. Her body was settling down a little now. It was all over. Everything was all right. There had hardly been any blood.

On screen, Glenda Farrell was lounging in white, fur-trimmed pajamas in a white room. The light was unnatural, dazzling. Linda had always loved movies like this one, and she wondered if Robin did, too, or just watched with the same dispassionate attention she gave the landscape when they drove. “You have a little sunburn,” Linda said. At least she hadn’t been in the room all morning.

“Uh-huh.”

Glenda Farrell played with a white kitten and turned the pages of a magazine.

“What’s this about?” Linda asked.

“I don’t know,” Robin said. “I was sleeping before, when you came in.”

“Mmmmm,” Linda said. “
That
sounds like a good idea.” She moved further down between the sheets. They felt so clean and cool. She had not died, after all.

A newscaster appeared on the screen in startling color. “This just into the newsroom,” he announced. “A Des Moines abortion clinic was heavily damaged by two firebombs a short time ago as three abortions were taking place inside. In the panic and confusion that followed the attack, patients, doctors, and nurses ran from the smoking building on South Allison Street. No one seems to have been severely injured, although two patients are as yet unaccounted for. It is believed they may have fled the scene. Many of the clinic’s files were destroyed by the blasts, and property damage is estimated at over thirty thousand dollars. Placard-carrying demonstrators from a group called MAD, or Mothers Against Death, who have been picketing the site for more than three weeks now, have denied responsibility for the bombing. A young man, wearing a bathrobe and bedroom slippers, who shouted obscenities at the fleeing women, has been taken into custody for questioning. A police spokesman says that the subject appears to be incoherent. More on the six o’clock news.”

Robin stared at the screen, apparently unmoved, disinterested. How could she be otherwise? There were bulletins like this one, and worse, all the time. The other day a man in Moline, Illinois, shot a gas-station attendant three times because the lines at the pumps were too long. The world was full of assorted lunacy and sorrow, most of it readied for instant publicity. God knows what else would show up on the six o’clock news.

Linda wondered if that was new blood pulsing down
there, or just an echo of her still erratic heartbeat. She lifted the covers to look and saw only the reassuring, pristine string of the tampon. “Did you have a nice morning?” she asked Robin.

“It was okay.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I went swimming. I hung around.”

“Oh. Well, that sounds nice.”

“Did you get anything?”

“Pardon?”

“When you went shopping. Did you buy anything?”

Linda sighed. “No, I just looked. Walked around.”

Someone knocked on Glenda Farrell’s door. “Who is it?” she called, her voice sweet with expectancy.

18
They didn’t get back on the road again for two days because Linda couldn’t seem to stay awake. Whenever she would rouse herself, she’d only go to the bathroom. Then she would pad back to the bedroom, where she’d look down through the window at the parking lot before collapsing into bed again.

The weather had changed suddenly, due to a warm front moving up from the Southwest, the man on television said, and it had been raining steadily for a day and a half. Robin kept going out to the coffee shop to bring in food for both of them.

Linda had turned the maid away at the door yesterday, and again today. “Sick,” she’d said, without removing the chain.

“What’s the matter with you?” Robin asked. “You’re sleeping an awful lot.”

“Spinning wheel,” Linda mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I think it’s all that driving we’ve done so far, all this rain. I’m just exhausted, that’s all. A few more hours and I’ll probably be raring to go.”

“Where?”
Robin asked. They still hadn’t discussed any possible plans.

But Linda was asleep again.

The two wastebaskets filled up with junk: half-eaten hamburgers and limp fries, greasy paper bags, candy wrappers, collapsed soft-drink cans. Robin ate and drank twice as much as Linda. She licked ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, salt, and chocolate from her fingers. Her belly felt round and taut, and when she slapped it, it
sounded like a small drum. She could burp at will, and often did.

She hid under the hood of her slicker every time she ran out for new supplies, terrified that she would meet the man from the game room again. As she ran she made up things she would say to him if she did see him. She’d tell him that she was only thirteen years old, jailbait in
every
state, that her father was the chief of police and intended to kill him. She would burp in his face and then puncture the tires on his car with the fork from her father’s house. She kept it ready in the right-hand pocket of her slicker.

The swimming pool was deserted. All the webbed lounges were folded and stacked in a corner of the deck. An abandoned towel lay near them, twisted and soaked. Watching the rain hit the surface of the blue water made Robin feel unaccountably anxious and she hurried back to the room. She was going crazy with boredom there. There was nothing to do but watch television, strip the translucent layers of skin from her shoulders where they had begun to peel, and wait for Linda to wake up for good.

Finally she did. When Robin opened her eyes the next morning, she found that Linda was dressed and packing. She was very cheerful. “Rise and shine, morning glory! The sun is out!” she announced, as if it were a phenomenon for which she was personally responsible. She urged Robin to get moving, to pack up her things so they could get an early start.

Again, Robin asked where. Linda didn’t answer right away, and Robin said, “
You’re
going to California. But what about me?”

Linda sat down on the bed, next to her suitcase. She picked at the lock with one fingernail. “Robin,” she said softly. “Do you ever think about your mother?”

The southern route Wolfie had suggested seemed sensible and appealing, now that their destination was Arizona. In Des Moines they picked up I-35, which took them quickly in and out of Missouri. Linda remembered further information from those Presidential place mats in the Marriott. Missouri was called the “Show Me” state. It was the birthplace of Harry S. Truman. “Do you know who was born around here?” she asked Robin.

Robin leaned back and shut her eyes, but Linda suspected she was only pretending to sleep. After they crossed the border into Kansas, Robin sat up and began fiddling with the radio. On one station the Mamas and the Papas were singing that Golden Oldie, “California Dreamin’.” “Oh, leave that!” Linda cried, and she began to hum along and move her shoulders to the music as she drove. She thought: By the time I get there, it will probably have fallen into the ocean.

There had been a discussion of natural disasters on a television show just last week, while they were still in Illinois. “The fault of the Fault,” one panelist quipped, and a seismologist from UCLA predicted that a major earthquake would probably beat out any process of erosion. The moderator interrupted to ask why these two distinguished scientists continued to live in Southern California, considering their firsthand knowledge of predestined doom. The seismologist said cheerfully that there were all
kinds
of doom in the wings, everywhere. Tidal waves, drought, Halley’s comet, tornadoes, plagues.
“Do you think you’re going to be safe in Westport?” he asked. Killer bees and towering infernos were kids’ stuff. He said that Hollywood apocalypse writers couldn’t dream up some of the real disasters in store for us. Besides, he added, his wife wanted to live near her mother. Everyone had laughed and applauded.

By the time Linda got there, if it still
was
there, she wouldn’t even know the latest dance steps. They changed every minute. John Travolta would be as old as Fred Astaire. Maybe she wouldn’t even be able to get a job. Everything was changing. Gas prices had gone up five cents a gallon while she was sleeping off the effects of the abortion in Des Moines. The money was dwindling quickly, and she was still determined to give Robin half of everything left. It would only be fair to Miriam, too, after presenting her with a full-grown, money-eating child, without any warning. The woman was still at that same address in Glendale, Arizona, according to Information. Eight years later; as if time had completely halted. Linda had decided to call ahead and talk to Miriam, straightforwardly, so as not to make the same disastrous mistake she’d made with those people in Iowa.

But Robin had extracted Linda’s promise, had made her swear not to announce their arrival beforehand. She was practically hysterical about it. And Linda had given in, crossed her heart, hoped to die, and all the rest, if she ever betrayed that promise. She did telephone, though, from a gas station in Bethany, Missouri, using a ton of change to get through, to make sure Miriam was really still there, still alive. The phone rang for a long time before she answered. As Linda fed nickels and quarters into the slot, she pictured a beautiful dark-haired
woman in a white tennis dress, running in from the garden.

From the phone booth she could see Robin sitting on the hood of the Maverick parked in the shade, killing another Coke.

It may have been Linda’s imagination, but Miriam’s voice sounded eerily long-distance, like the voices of the dead in movies about zombies and ghosts. “Hell-ooo?” she said.

“Just one moment. That will be fifteen cents more, please,” the operator said.

The telephone booth was like a furnace and Linda’s hands were sweating, making the coins stick, but she finally found and separated a dime and a nickel and dropped them in.

“Go ahead. Here’s your party,” the operator said.

“Hell-
ooo
?” the ghost called again, impatiently this time.

“Miriam … Miriam … Hausner?” Linda asked. Robin was bouncing on the hood of the car, like a three-year-old. Why am I so nervous, Linda wondered. It’s not
my
mother.

“Speaking.”

Now what? It seemed rude to simply hang up. Linda had had her share of anonymous phone calls. They always left her feeling faintly anxious for days after. And she had just dumped more than two dollars into that telephone. “Mrs. Hausner? This is a survey,” she said. “We were wondering if you’re listening to your radio.”

“Is this some kind of a
joke?
” Miriam asked.

And Linda lost heart. “Yes,” she said, and hung up.

Now they were on their way. As she drove, she
glanced from time to time at Robin’s profile. She had not meant to spring her plans on the poor girl like that, but Robin had asked with such persistence, and she certainly had a right to know. Linda never expected the reaction she got, though. Robin was usually so passive about everything, so secretive. And memories of her mother had to be baby-vague now, no matter how grave the loss must have felt, once.

Wright had told Linda that he’d worked very hard to make up to Robin for Miriam’s disappearance, that he’d been mother and father all by himself. You name it: dollhouses, sports, handicrafts, school projects; he really got involved. They were as close as
that
. He’d held up knotted fingers. And Robin stopped asking for her mother in a very short time. Time had eased his own anguish, too, and he had prepared a generous, watered-down version of the truth, in case adolescence brought new curiosity. Linda thought he’d arranged to make Miriam sound like an innocent and suggestible kid, someone who fell in with bad companions, sort of a middle-class Patty Hearst. Luckily, Robin seemed to have forgotten all about her mother, and never mentioned her to him again.

Still, he was grateful for Linda’s appearance in his daughter’s life at this delicate period of growth and change. He may have been successful as a parental one-man band, but he was respectful, in awe of woman’s special mysteries, among them her need for the company and confidence of other females, after a certain age. Linda and Robin were going to be close, too. Like
that
. He just knew it.

In the motel room that morning, when Linda said,
“Robin, do you ever think about your mother?” the girl had been stunned. Her mouth opened into a perfect cartoon O and her eyelids batted with shock. For once she was incapable of hiding behind her disguise of indifference, those trouble-shedding little shrugs. She actually staggered before she sat down on the other bed.

“You’re not going to cry, are you?” Linda said, although Robin considered it a source of pride that she never did, and Linda believed it would be consoling if she could. “Oh, boy, I’ve really upset you, haven’t I?” Linda continued. “I didn’t mean to. I only thought … it seemed like the
natural
answer. I mean, I’m not even sure she’s still there; I was going to check it all out first, but you kept asking … Robin?”