My phone buzzed with messages from Nancy.
The first time I’d left her, I’d done it without thinking. I resented the way she had begun trying to fit me into her future, wondering to me if she should tell her family, if we would stay in Albuquerque if things went badly. I had just met a guy with a truck who had family in Texas; I thought to myself, You don’t see me at all. I’m halfway out of here already, and you don’t even see it. And when I slung my foot out the window that night in late spring—a decade ago now—it felt like I was fulfilling my own prediction. I’d put everything that mattered to me into my turquoise backpack—high-tops, iPod, star-shaped sunglasses. The guy who was waiting for me in the truck down the street wiped cheese from his fingers, truck still smelling like Wienerschnitzel drive-thru. I’d climbed out of my bedroom window thinking: I’m free, I’m free, I could eat the moon! I’d hung my head out of the car window like a dog, my fingers squeezed tightly by his oily ones, as if he could feel my future straining away from him, too big for my flesh to hold, much less his. And Nancy had faded next to the marquee-bright image of my future self.
Now I saw that I had only been telling myself I was free, just as Leslie had. She had molded me into her perfect companion, fitting my personality around her own. A zero-sum girlhood—you be smart, I’ll be charming, you’ll cut your hair and I’ll grow mine out. You be the general and I your lieutenant. When she’d loosed me from her, I’d been only half a person, Leslie inverted. It was just as Daddy had done: dreamed us up, his children, put his name on us, fleshed us out in his imagination, and then, when we arrived, found us lacking—not pretty enough, maybe, not boy enough; not enough like him, or too much so, idiot mirrors.
It sounds like horror, but it’s lovely to be invented, to know what you’re for. And awful to know your purpose and be kept from it. If Daddy had invented us because he wanted silent children, we would have been thrilled to silence ourselves. But he’d wanted to love us, and we knew it, and he couldn’t really—so we went on straining, contorting ourselves into lovable poses. If he’d loved us more, I would have been less beautiful, I thought, and Leslie less dependable. In the years that Leslie had refused to speak to me I’d only grown better at being what she needed.
On some level I’d known that when I’d picked out her car in the Vegas parking lot and climbed onto the hood. I had spent ten years coring strangers and spitting them out, covering myself in lesser love, ruining them in the process. I wanted what everybody wants: to see and be seen. But I frightened ordinary people when I grew tired of niceties, and the other ones, the ones like Clery, were incapable of appreciating my infinite tenderness. The only one who had ever got close was Nancy, who let my love suffocate her, who let me dig her fears out of her with my nails. I was desperate to be known again. I think that’s why I decided to let Leslie meet me all-new. To see if she would still love me. And she did still love me. She did.
I hadn’t been sure of that before. When I ran away, I thought she would be indifferent to my disappearance, as she had been to my presence. Like my mother, I’d made the mistake of thinking I could remove myself from my life in a neat, single motion. But it cost something to disappear—I was older now, and understood a little more. The escape Leslie had imagined for herself would cost her all her old happiness. And mine would cost me Nancy.
I wondered where she was now. I decided I would keep her in my head just as she had been that day at the lookout, small, lean, gold, with her chin tilted up and the bloody smudges of my lips across her face, marking her before she knew I’d done it.
Leslie was gone when I got back to the house, and my things were packed on the bed, the room stinking of lemon cleaner. I went through the duffel bag curiously, but she hadn’t touched the veladora, only folded my clothes and stacked them inside. It felt like the kind of thing she might have done for me when I left ten years ago, if we’d been friends then.
I carried the duffel bag downstairs and took out my phone, letting the back door slam shut behind me. This morning I’d told Leslie I knew people, good people.
It was true.
56
Leslie
I sat with my father in the sunken living room. The television was on, flickering in the darkness. He couldn’t speak anymore, so he wrote to me on a little whiteboard in his cramped lawyer handwriting.
The squeak of the dry-erase marker. He held up the board so I could see.
Where is Robin
“I don’t know,” I said.
He bent and coughed into his paper towel. I kept the roll right next to his armchair so he could always reach for a new sheet. There was a pile of crumpled dirty ones in and around the wastebasket.
I went back to watching the television. It was an old cartoon, leaping wraithlike figures whose limbs lengthened as they walked. Cab Calloway.
He held up the whiteboard again.
Find her
* * *
—
I opened my eyes. Dave was still next to me under the Chimayo blanket, his chest rising and falling peaceably.
My alarm was bleating into the sheets. I swiped my phone off and got up, moving slowly so as not to rock the mattress. Going to Daddy’s house to pack up the last of the stuff, I texted him. On the bedside table, Dave’s phone made a noise like a triangle.
I didn’t take anything with me except my phone and my purse with the fifty thousand dollars in it. That was all I would take if I were going to clean out the house.
It was hot outside even at nine-thirty. Memorial Day weekend. The pool would be open till midnight now. I wouldn’t be here to visit.
The sky was a huge flat expanse before me, and the Sandia Mountains recalled their name, the morning light turning them pink as fruit flesh.
Would I miss it here?
I’d never lived anywhere else.
Maybe I’d forget after a while. Rewrite my life as I had rewritten it before. Cut out the bad and ignore the vestigial guilt.
But I knew as I thought it that I would never forget. I could never love anyone as much, or disappoint them as completely.
It seemed to take a long time to reach the house on Riviera, the beginning and end of my life.
There was a white Nissan two-door idling in the driveway, but as I rolled closer I could see that no one was inside it. Were Robin’s friends already here? I had thought it would be a surprise, maybe—a few bruises, carried roughly into a waiting car. This one seemed too small, and to walk into an occupied house seemed more daunting than a surprise attack. I pulled up beside the curb and shut off the engine. The lights were on in the house and a muffled noise was coming from behind the door, audible now that the car wasn’t running.
I got out and shut the door. My hands were shaking. It took me a long time to find the right key. I hadn’t thought about whether it would hurt until this moment. I hadn’t thought about how there would be a stranger in my house—someone who would hit me, really hit me.