I was moving so fast that I bumped into someone’s cart and knocked a box of cereal from it. I came around the corner in frozen foods and almost collided with a man holding a box of macaroni and cheese, reading the back, and I saw that it was the gym teacher again but I suddenly couldn’t recall his first name, only that he wanted Robert to play soccer, that I needed paper towels, and that my son was gone. He knew right away, as he looked up, saw me, smiled, then frowned, that something was wrong.
“I can’t find Robert,” I said, my voice an octave higher than usual, almost falsetto.
“Calm down,” he said. “Calm down.” He took my arm at the elbow and led me toward the front of the store, leaving our two carts next to the freezer cases, glass and chrome and foggy windows like the cases in the morgue at the hospital, where we nurses tried never to go if we could help it. I could tell by the feel of his hand at my elbow that he was used to taking charge. “He can’t have gone far,” he said, like it was something he’d said before. At the window where they cashed checks he stuck his head inside. “Excuse me,” he called, and then I remembered that his name was Mike. A heavy girl with bad skin came to the window. CUSTOMER SERVICE, said the sign over her head.
“I’m on break,” she said.
“We’ve lost a child,” Mike Riordan said. “Can you do a page or something? Robert is his name, Robert Crenshaw.”
“I can’t page without the manager.”
“Where’s the manager?”
She called into the back “Where’s Lenny?” and there was a mumbled sound, and then she came out of the booth and I started to cry, my hands over my face. “Kids get lost in here a lot,” she said, as if to be helpful, and then, calling over to the closest register, “Pete, where’s Lenny?”
“Hold on,” Pete said. “I got a price check.”
“Where’s the paging equipment?” Mike Riordan said pleasantly.
The girl pointed back toward the booth, and he said, “Use it right now or I’m going to go in and use it myself.”
“Don’t have a spas, mister,” she said. “Your wife should have been watching him.”
“There’s Lenny,” Pete called, and Mike turned toward a dark man in white shirt and pants. HERE TO SERVE YOU: LENNY said the tag on his shirt.
“Please,” I said.
“They want me to page for their kid,” said the girl. “They can’t find him. I told them I couldn’t page without you saying so.”
“He’s ten,” I said. “He was supposed to be in the comic aisle. Where the cards and magazines are.”
“Skinny kid?” said Lenny. “Dark hair, green shirt?”
“Yes,” I said, knowing the worst, knowing what Lenny would say next, describing the man who’d left with the kid as dark, nice-looking, big through the arms and shoulders, looked like the kid, looked like his dad. And Mike Riordan would want to call the police and I would want to die, right here in the supermarket, rather than go home to that apartment alone. Or back to Brooklyn.
“I just threw him out on his butt. He’s probably still out in the parking lot.”
“What?” Mike Riordan said, but I was already halfway to the doors. The pavement between the store and the parking lot was full of people loading groceries into the backs of their cars, but off to one side, where the gum machines and the little automated horse ride stood, Robert was sitting on the ground, his arms held tight around his knees, his head down as though he was one of those little black bugs, the ones that roll up into a ball to protect themselves when they’re disturbed.
I ran to him, touched his arm, and he jumped, then jumped at me, almost knocked me down as he threw his arms around me. Neither of us spoke and I just held him, held him tight, saying nothing, trying to stop the shaking in his back and shoulders. Then I heard a voice behind me say, “Hi, Robert. You okay?” But Robert shook his head and kept it pressed to the front of my body, although his arms had fallen to his sides.
“That bastard, excuse my French, says that he thought Robert was alone and that they have a rule against unsupervised kids in the store,” Mike Riordan said from behind me. “Apparently they’ve had some problems with vandalism, shoplifting, and he just throws kids out if they’re by themselves.”
Robert’s head snapped up, and spit flew from his mouth as he cried, “I told him and told him that my mom was there and I could find her. I told him I wasn’t unsupervised. He just kept saying sure, sure, she’ll find you outside. He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Oh, sweetie,” I said, holding him tight, but he pulled away.
“He wouldn’t even let me look for you. I told him where you were, and then you weren’t there. Where did you go? Where did you go?” He was so loud now that an elderly man came over to peer at him, at us, as though to save him from being abducted by the woman in the faded blue shorts and white polo shirt, the man in the blue button-down and the aviator glasses. “He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s just upset,” Mike said.
“I told him,” Robert said, crying, and I reached for him again but he pushed me away. He slumped back against the big glass window at the front of the supermarket.
“I told that guy I’d be writing to the head of the supermarket chain,” Mike Riordan said. “That was the most stupid, sadistic thing I’ve ever seen. All he had to do was walk him around the market.”
Robert mumbled something, and I leaned in to listen. “I don’t care what you said,” he said. “I told him that my dad would kill him. I told him that he’d shoot him with his gun.”
“Let’s go home,” I said.
“I’ll drive you,” Mike Riordan said.
That night Robert and I had frozen pizza for dinner. We’d left all our groceries in the store; so had Mike Riordan. “I hate this place,” Robert said, and I did not reply.
I was frightened then, and no amount of paint, no optimistic plans, no hours in the school library, no TYs from Jennifer nor “Sit, Mrs. Nurse” from Mrs. Levitt could take that feeling away. No framed prints hung between the windows could change the fact that the blinds were drawn, sullen and mute. That moment in the supermarket, when I was certain Robert was gone, saw only emptiness in the space where he had been, was like a dress rehearsal for disaster. Afterward, adrenaline was always in my blood, as though I swallowed it down every morning with my vitamins. It was like those times years ago when I went to police funerals with Bobby, and felt, as the sound of taps floated over the cemetery, as though I was rehearsing the agony of losing him. It was the greatest pain I could imagine. But I was young then.
Coastal storms blew across the state all through the end of October, and the dried and yellowed branches of palms would slither across the roof over my bedroom sometimes late into the night, the wind blowing gravel from the center courtyard with a sound like bullets spraying the brick walls outside. The storm windows shook in their frames, and I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, waiting for the surreptitious sound of the front door opening. I went over it every night in my mind, how it might have been different, how I could have saved us all: me and Robert and Bobby, too. Sometimes I’d lull myself to sleep with memories of the two of us pushing Robert in his stroller around the neighborhood, Bobby’s brawny arm brushing against my own, the hair rising on both, his black and thick, mine pale and downy. Or I’d see Bobby in my mind in the backyard in September, picking tomatoes, looking at each one carefully before he put it into a colander Robert was holding solemnly, proudly, at chest level, as though he was a little acolyte, a backyard altar boy. I guess it told me everything I needed to know about my past life, that I’d lie in bed crying while those pictures passed before my mind’s eye, feeling the ordinary soft sweetness of those summer days, and yet listening at the same time for the noise of someone coming into the apartment to get me, to push me around, to punch me out, to take me out. I was lonely for that other Bobby, the one who whispered in my ear in bed so he wouldn’t wake the boy, who sometimes held his hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t make too much noise when he was on top of me.
“You’ll scare the kid, Fran,” he’d say close to my ear, and I could tell by the sound of his voice that he liked that, liked that he made me squirm and scream that way.
But he made me scream those other ways, too, or at least moan and cry: please, no. That was my marriage: please, yes, sometimes; please, no, the others. If only I could have stayed with one Bobby and left the other.
“You had no choice,” I said over and over to myself. Sometimes I said it out loud in the little box of a bedroom.
After that day in the supermarket, Robert was scared, too. I could tell by the way he behaved in the daylight, truculent and distant, when he’d kick a book across the floor or sit alone in his room, staring at the yellow aluminum siding of the house next door. I could tell by the way he behaved at night, trembling and clingy. He said the bathroom plumbing was keeping him awake, gurgling and burping through the thin wall, and asked if he could sleep in my bed. I wanted to let him, so much, if only to have someone I loved next to me, to help me sleep. But I knew it wasn’t good for him. It reminded me of when he was a baby, when I’d had to let him cry himself to sleep, to teach him not to keep getting up in the middle of the night, to keep him from being so cranky during the day. Bobby held me down, the first night, when Robert wailed for twenty minutes straight and I wanted to go to him. The next night it was ten minutes, and the next he fell asleep before I’d even gotten down the hall. I thought about that all the time now, how sometimes you have to do hard things to your kids to do the right thing for them in the long run. But I still felt the way I’d felt that night, ready to give up, give in, at a moment’s notice.
We struck a bargain, Robert and I. We dragged his mattress into my room, next to my bed. I draped my arm over the side and held his hand. He slept there for four days, then dragged the mattress back. It’s easier to heal, I guess, when you’re ten. I still hear noises in the night, the plumbing, the wind, the cars, the past.
I hurry down the dusty streets of Lake Plata, my walk just this side of a run, and wait for Robert to come home from school every day. Sometimes I hear him out in the courtyard talking to Bennie, the two of them fooling around, whacking each other with their sweatshirts, pulling off each other’s caps. Sometimes I just hear the slam of a car door when a mother has arranged to drop him off, or when Mr. Riordan has driven some of them home from soccer. “Thank you,” I hear Robert call. He is never really late. He knows.
“Hi,” I say as he drops his backpack just inside the door, but it is as though now my real life has begun, as though I’ve shopped and cleaned and tended to other people in a kind of trance. I never felt this way before, when I worked at the hospital and Robert went after school to his grandmother’s for an hour or two. But my life was different then, larger. Now it has been whittled away to its essentials. I make certain kinds of foods because Robert likes them. I bake so that he will have nice desserts. The refrigerator is covered with his test papers. I even bought a baby monitor, the kind we once kept by our bed so we could hear the sounds from his crib, so that he would not even whimper without me knowing it. Now I have the receiver under Robert’s bed, the monitor under my pillow. Sometimes I can hear him mumbling in his dreams. It puts me to sleep, like the sound of the ocean, knowing he is there. Knowing that if someone opens his bedroom window, I will hear it.
Often I go in and watch as he sleeps the sleep of a ten-year-old, as close to unconsciousness as a healthy human being can be. I know my greatest fear is his fondest wish. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. He loved Bobby as I once had, viscerally, from the gut, with no regard to events. Bobby was just the sort of father that a small boy would be likely to love. “Does your dad have a gun?” his friends could ask, and he could nod, safe and secure. Once in second grade he wrote a story about what we did, Bobby and I. The first sentence was “My daddy makes sure bad things never happen.”
The copy of One Fish, Two Fish we’d brought from home sat on Robert’s bedside table, and sometimes he read it, although once or twice he said he was going to give it to Chad Roerbacker. The fish looked so friendly and familiar, smiling up from the page, their cowlicks splayed, their fins akimbo. One night Robert was paging through it and said, “Remember when I was five and you used to lie down next to me on the bed while I fell asleep?” I was sorry, later, standing by his bed, looking down at him, that I hadn’t said or done more. Next night I slid out of my rubber flipflops and lay down next to Robert, smiling, my arm over his chest.
“Mom, no offense, okay?” he said, “but I’m a little too big for this.”
But before he went to sleep he would always suffer me to sit by the side of his bed, and he would ask me questions about my childhood, about whether I liked sharing a room with Aunt Grace, about whether it was scary to be home alone while my mother worked, about my father’s job as a fireman and the big fires in which he’d been involved, as though he was constructing from the ground up a life he’d loved and lost, a life I’d seemingly obliterated in one trip. He particularly liked the one about the time a man with a gun had robbed the bakery on a Sunday morning when I was sixteen, in the desultory fallow period between the 9:00 and 10:30 masses, when I usually rearranged the doughnut trays and wiped down the glass cases. “You’re kidding, right?” I’d said when he asked for the cash. And after I’d filled a brown bag with bills he’d demanded doughnuts, cream-filled, chocolate-frosted. “I’m not giving anybody pastry who just robbed the place,” I’d said, and then Mr. Orlofsky from down the block had come in for his Sunday morning seedless rye, and the man had turned and run from the counter, clutching the bag and the gun, knocking Mr. Orlofsky down.
“Tell the doughnut story,” Robert said, and then, after, “That was cool. That was brave.”
“Jesus God, what a stupid thing to do,” Bobby had said on our second date, when I’d told him the story.
“Tell the doughnut story,” Robert said. “I told it to Bennie. He thought I made it up.”
“I would have given him kaiser rolls,” I said, “but not pastry.”
“Tell it from the beginning.” He played with my hands, with my fingers, as I told it again—the register, the bills falling into the bag like play money, the sound of the bell on the door as Mr. Orlofsky came inside. Each night, as I stood to go downstairs, he would ask one question:
Does Grandmom know where we are?
Does Aunt Grace know where we are?
Does Mrs. Selick, the third-grade teacher, or Father Charles, who gave him First Communion, or Mrs. Pinto?
And over and over I would say no. No, honey, no, Ba, until finally one night he told me he didn’t want to be called Ba anymore, if I didn’t mind, if it didn’t hurt my feelings, no offense, but he was too old now.
He never asked “Does Daddy know where we are?” He knew that was the point. I’d sent Grace that note with the photographs because I hadn’t wanted her to file a missing persons report. But I was as sure as I was sure of anything that Bobby would never do that, would know that the guys in the missing persons section almost always found a missing spouse healthier, happier, somewhere else. He would never countenance the whispers around the force: “You know Benedetto, the guy in narcotics? His wife took off on him, man. Took his kid, too.”
Why had I been frightened of that young flat-faced cop at the door of the elementary school that first morning? There would be no outside interference. If Bobby came it would be on his own, slithering over the roof like a big palm frond in a high wind. But I’d be ready for him. Mr. Castro had a tangle of tools in the closet just inside the door of the Castro apartment, and one day I’d asked to borrow his crowbar, and hadn’t given it back. It was under my bed. No matter when I touched it it was always cold, like a dead thing beneath me.
Robert allowed himself to be looked after now, to be babied, in his father’s words. It was as though the supermarket had given him a taste of something, an inkling of terror and of loss. Our nighttime conversations were the ones he’d had when he was a smaller boy, with less scar tissue: “What if,”
I said at breakfast, and he said, softly, sweetly, “we went to the beach …”
“… and you had a really big boogie board …”
“… and got good enough at riding the waves that I could stand up like a surfer …”
“… and dolphins swam up to shore and swam around you …”
“… and I could understand what they were saying …”
“Yo, Robert,” Bennie yelled from outside in the dusty quadrangle. “The bus is coming.”
“We’ll go to the beach soon,” I said as I kissed Robert goodbye. “I promise.”
It wasn’t really good-bye at all, only see you soon, for every morning I followed the bus route on foot, met up with Cindy just as I had that first day. She usually brought me something: a jar of collagen cream, a crock of genuine Vermont maple syrup, tomatoes from her parents’ farm. “Oh, please,” she’d say dismissively when I tried to thank her. It was easier to thank her obliquely. “I love that perfume,” I’d say, or “That’s a good color on you,” and she’d smile. Her teeth overlapped in the front, and she always smiled with her mouth closed, unless she was having a really good time, and then she forgot.