Free Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

more frequent. The drive from Birmingham to Ypsilanti was nearly forty miles but not a sufficient deterrent for the older woman who’d given up her volunteer work in Birmingham, she’d said, and her friends, to “help out” her “disabled” daughter.
    Dinah had grown to dread the sound of her mother’s voice as she knocked on the front door—“Dinah? I know you’re home. Please open this door.”
    If Dinah wasn’t feeling well, lying on a sofa in the living room, at the rear of the house, her mother was likely to come peer in the window, shading her eyes to make out Dinah cringing beneath a blanket.
    “Dinah! Let me in, or I’ll call 911. This isn’t normal.”
    Sometimes, Dinah was lying on Robbie’s little bed. In Robbie’s room on the second floor.
    This room had not been altered since the day of Robbie’s disappearance of course. It was a small room beside Dinah and Whit’s bedroom and when Dinah had been pregnant with Robbie she’d fantasized having a door between the rooms that might be kept open at night. Like a nursery in a fancier sort of house.
    Now, the room was a small-boy’s room. There was a four-foot bookcase Whit had built for Robbie out of glass blocks and in this bookcase were Robbie’s storybooks—quite a few, in fact. In a paralysis of hope and dread Dinah would remove one of the books from its shelf—
The Littlest Fox
, with its astonishingly beautiful watercolor illustrations—and quickly skim the familiar text, that she and Robbie had both memorized. She recalled how, when she read the story to Robbie, he’d begun to read along with her, running his finger beneath the words. He’d gotten ahead of Mommy, sometimes! She could hear his voice, which left her shaken.
    On the pale-blue walls of Robbie’s room were more of the child’s drawings and paintings as well as photographs and snapshots that Robbie, with his somewhat quirky taste, had particularly liked: some were pictures of himself, and Mommy and Daddy; one was Robbie with pre-school classmates at the Montessori school, and their smiling vivacious Miss Jameson; others were glossy pictures of animals—dinosaurs, a gigantic octopus, lions, elephants, giraffes, antelopes, wild horses. Recently Robbie had become fixated on horses and had it in his head that Mommy and Daddy should buy a farm in the country so that he could have a pony.
    “And who would take care of the pony?”—Daddy had asked.
    “Me.”
    “
You
? By yourself?”
    “Well—me and Mommy.”
    They’d repeated this exchange many times. Why it was so funny, Dinah couldn’t say. But they laughed, and laughed.
    Well—me and Mommy.
    More recently Robbie had taped to his walls posters of hulking figures dressed for intergalactic space, or for war—video-game-like warriors that were unsettling, in a child’s room. Dinah had told Whit that she wasn’t ready for this yet—Robbie was only five years old! Whit said, sensibly, We can’t censor our kid. Don’t even try.
    Now that Robbie was gone, Dinah wondered if she should remove the warrior-posters? Reasoning that, when Robbie returned, he’d have forgotten them—wouldn’t he?
    Mid-mornings when Dinah’s medication caused her to weave groggily along the upstairs hall it was natural to her to enter Robbie’s room and lie down carefully—not fall down, limp and exhausted—onto the little bed which was always neatly made-up.
    “Robbie. Oh, Robbie …”
    She lay very still. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and spilled over onto her cheeks.
    “It was my fault, honey. I should never—never—have let go of your hand.”
    She held her breath waiting for Robbie to speak to her. She did not exhale her breath for so long, her heart began to beat irregularly.
    “Can you hear me, Robbie? It’s Mommy. We’re looking for you, honey, and we will never, never give up.”
    Dinah! Dinah!
—there came an urgent rapping on the door downstairs.
    The rapping was at the front door. If Dinah didn’t hurry