She lay flat on her back and closed her eyes, the cool of the pillow against her neck, her palms resting on the soft sheets. She listened to the hum of the air conditioner, trying not to let her own thoughts get the best of her, the nursery rhyme playing in her head, over and over,Knickknack paddywhack, give the dog a bone...
The stray dog her mother had brought home, a pit puppy named Brutus with silver fur and big sad eyes. Brutus, that had been his name, and he’d licked Robin’s nose, making her laugh. But her father...
I can’t, Renee. You know that. My allergies.
But, Mitchell, he has nowhere to go...
The baby bird has no mother. Let me help her, she has nowhere to go...
She has nowhere to go. She won’t be any trouble. She can clean up around the house and help me take care of Robbie. Come on, Mitchell, please...
Mom always taking in strays. Dad always making her take them back... “Mom,” Robin whispered, her voice small and alone in the darkened room. “Mom. Don’t go. I need you more than Dad does now. Don’t listen to him. Don’t do what he says for once. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.”
And then she was sobbing. How fast that had happened, that shift from the brink of sleep to this—Robin bent in two, clasping her knees, her throat aching, all the breath knocked out of her.This is the way grief is. This is the way it’s always going to be. It lies in wait and then it pounces and there’s nothing you can do. There will never be anything you can do to make it better...
She reached for the bottle of sleeping pills on her nightstand, dropped two of them into her mouth, choked them down withoutwater. She ran a hand across her wet face and waited for sleep to take her out, thinking again of that young babysitter—a teenage girl. Her mother’s last stray.She can take care of Robbie, Mitchell. She loves Robbie so much.Her mother’s arms around the girl’s shoulders. And how old had Robin been? Around eight or nine. The girl had called herself CoCo and she’d played Barbies with Robin and let her watch MTV and she’d let her comb her hair. Such long, pretty blond hair and blue eyes. Bright blue eyes.CoCo. Nicola. Oh, how you’ve changed...“Mom,” Robin whispered into her arm as she drifted off to sleep. “Your stray has come back.”
ONE SUMMER NIGHT,when she was ten years old, Robin woke up thinking that someone was breaking into her house. She’d heard the floorboards creaking when she was still half asleep, and she tried telling herself—as her parents had always told her when she was little and frightened by noises in the middle of the night—that it was just the old house settling. But then there had been a crash downstairs, and Robin had sat up in bed, too frightened to scream. After a few moments, she’d heard the squeak of the back door opening.
Robin had sneaked out of bed and peered out her window. She saw it right away: the shadow of a man, turned away from the house, facing the hedges on the far side of the garden. A shadow that, even from the upstairs window and in such a terrified state, she had recognized as her father.
Robin had put her sneakers on. She’d hurried downstairs and into the backyard, just as he was putting out a cigarette. The shiny red ashtray cupped in his hand, his cheeks flushed, even in the dim garden lights. Dad. Smoking.
Don’t tell Mom, he had said, finger to his lips.
Standing now in her parents’ backyard at two in the morning, thirty years later and with her father in his grave, Robin could practically see him here again, surprised as he’d been on that night, Dad caught in the act in his pajamas and robe, stale smoke hovering between them as he turned to her, shame all over his face.
You never truly know anyone. Every human being who has lived long enough to make mistakes has secrets stashed away in the back of a locked closet or stored in a cloud or crouching in the darkest depths of the brain, moments of weakness that they’ve worked their whole lives to hide, even from those they love most. Especially from those they love most.
Robin’s father smoked. Her mother owned a gun.
Robin shut her eyes tight for several seconds and inhaled the smell of her parents’ garden—the pasty scent of tiger lilies hanging in the sticky night air, the same way it had the night of her father’s forbidden cigarette break. It had been the same time of year. Summer vacation, Robin biding her time until camp, each day an endless day in an endless summer in which nothing bad would happen.Promise me you won’t smoke anymore, Dad, she had said. He’d given her a smile.I’ll try not to, honey.Such a good person. Unable to make a promise to his daughter that he might not be able to keep. When Robin opened her eyes again, they were filled with tears.
The full moon bathed her parents’ garden and made it glow like an image in a dream. When she’d left her house, Eric had been asleep in the bed beside her, so thoroughly unconscious that she hadn’t even needed to worry about keeping quiet as she escaped. She assumed he’d gotten into her sleeping pills, which was understandable. He had work in the morning.
At 1:30A.M., Robin had woken up from a fitful half-sleep, the pills not working quite as well as she’d hoped. She’d watched Eric for a few moments—his pained, twitching face—wondering what he could possibly be dreaming. And then she’d left. Threw some yoga pants on, some sneakers, along with the big T-shirt she’d been sleeping in—one of Eric’s, from a marathon he’d run back in 2004. She’d driven to her parents’ house without thinking, as though drawn here by a magnet with no real idea why. She’d parked about a block and a half up, in front of the small public garden she sometimes played in as a kid, jogged from there to the house on the opposite side of the street, so as not to alert Mr. Dougherty of her presence.
She hadn’t come here to investigate. The police had swept the house days ago, after all, bagging anything noteworthy and taking it with them. No. Robin had devised an entire plan to get here unnoticed, just so she could breathe in this air and see if her parents’ home still held the same magic... the only place, all these years, where she ever truly felt calm.
It wasn’t the same. Of course it wasn’t. Tire tracks on the front lawn, remnants of yellow crime scene tape hanging from the front and back doors in tatters. The whole house dark, empty. Lifeless.
Who shot you, Dad? What were your last thoughts?
In her mind, she saw this place the way it had looked the night of the shootings. The whirling lights of the police cars, the rush to the front door. All those cops she didn’t know, pushing into her parents’ home. And Dad on the stretcher. The wide-open eyes. Whose eyes had he seen last?Who killed you, Dad?
Robin moved across the garden, to the line of hedges where she’d caught her father smoking. She could still smell cigarettes—clearly some miswired synapse, fried from grief.
She noticed something glinting between two of the hedges—a hard, shiny thing, reflecting the moonlight—and bent down for a closer look.
“Dad,” she whispered.
It was the ashtray. The same one.
Robin picked it up. An ashtray of red ceramic with black, white, and gold dice painted on it, the wordsLas Vegasswirling across oneside in ’60s-glam cursive. So unlike her scholarly, quiet father. But then, it hadn’t been like him to smoke either.
It was a good-size ashtray, and there was easily a pack of butts in it. She wondered when he’d smoked the last of these, which were all the same brand. Dad had been a Marlboro man, apparently.
Robin thought about taking the ashtray home with her as a souvenir. But instead she decided to replace it, crouching down and setting it gently back in its spot behind the hedges, hidden from Mom, from the world.
