Robinson - Part II

The siblings arrive in a dying factory town, haunted by ghosts from their past.

The second installment of my short story, “Robinson.” In part one- two estranged siblings reunite for an unsettling journey to the small town where their aunt and uncle lived. Beneath a pretense of nostalgia, the protagonist carries a dark secret…

I can see on Alex’s face as we pull into town that she’s struck with the same sick feeling I am, this bewildering sense of- what the hell are we doing back here? Alex laughs nervously as we cross the town limits. “Oh man. Maybe this was a mistake.”

Of course it was a mistake. We shouldn’t be here. We should be moving forward, getting on with our lives, rebuilding them and working towards a better future. Instead, we’re in a place we have no business returning to.

Nothing good can come of this.

Robinson is a vast swath of negative space. It is distinctly American in its defining characteristics: it’s an ugly, lazy, charmless place. As kids, we accepted it at face value, perhaps even a little more generously. It was just a flat, rural town where it never snowed much, people spoke with funny accents, and drive-through liquor stores were the height of luxury. Over the years, we saw the town build up—the Walmart expansion, the movie theater multiplex—but at its heart, it was always a small town in the dreariest sense of the words, a smudge on the map.

The last time we were here was the week before the auction, a decade ago. That ended an excruciating three-year ordeal that all but incinerated what was left of my family. First, there was the brain tumor.

It turned out that Uncle Gary’s well-earned retirement only accentuated his worst qualities. He began drinking more. No longer being drug tested, he started smoking pot again. Most nights he spent in the living room, sitting catatonic in his big brown recliner, watching satellite sports until the first light of day.

He stopped taking Aunt Daisy out for dinner. He barely even talked to her anymore. Their plans to travel and see the world fell by the wayside as he grew more obstinate and self righteous. Hadn’t he earned the right to relax? What was so bad with staying in Robinson? What was so great about New York or Europe? What could they do there that they couldn’t do here? He didn’t want to travel. He didn’t want to go out dancing. He didn’t want to talk. Uncle Gary just wanted to be left alone.

So Aunt Daisy did something I’ve come to believe was as intentional as it was unconscious. She developed cancer. A brain tumor. A way out.

By our last Christmas in Robinson, there was a palpable sense of unease. Within minutes of arriving, it became clear that the only thing magical about Robinson was the warmth my aunt infused their home with. The warmth was still there, but the flame was dwindling.

There were little indications that things weren’t right. The usual bake-off that preceded our arrival had been foregone. The Christmas gifts weren’t wrapped with care. The decorations seemed half-hearted. Our bedsheets hadn’t been washed or shaken out. When I went to make my bed in the guest room, a spider scampered out of the bedsheet. I woke up the next morning with a strange, penny-sized mark on my forearm that wouldn’t go away for the longest time. It outlived my aunt by half a year.

On our last night in Robinson, Aunt Daisy brought out a number of family heirlooms that none of us had ever seen before. She started giving them to us. Alex got a hand stitched pillow case our Grandma made. I got one of Grandpa’s dog tags from World War II. Later in the evening, I made the mistake of asking Daisy for the WiFi password. In hindsight, I should have asked Gary, but I wasn’t used to this new, proactive version of him that Daisy’s tumor had woken up. Instead of sitting comatose in that brown recliner, he was up and about, making dinner, taking Daisy to appointments, making sure she took her medication. He was trying.

I mistook my aunt’s seeming lucidity for something more than it was. Asking for the WiFi password sent her into a flurry of pitiful activity. Long after I said, “It’s okay, I don’t really need it,” she was still stalking from room to room, going through the drawers, frustrated and panicked. 

I laid a hand on her shoulder. Her frame was so much smaller than I had ever realized. “It’s okay,” I said. “It really doesn’t matter.” She was crying now. “Do you get confused, sometimes?” I asked gently.

She nodded. I took her in my arms. “I love you.”

For Christmas, I’d asked for an electric hair shaver. Aunt Daisy had bought it for me. And that night, Alex and I went out in Uncle Gary’s garage and Alex shaved my head. She wasn’t supposed to. I’d asked her to give me a buzzcut. But when she accidentally shaved a small patch down to the scalp, I decided to go for it. Maybe I was feeling self destructive. Daisy’s condition had upset me on a level I wasn’t ready to deal with, and shaving off every last bit of hair on my head seemed like as good a way as any to deal with the feelings.

When we walked back inside the house, Daisy was horrified. She kept saying, “Why would you do that? Why would you do that?” My parents were less concerned. My mom rolled her eyes, my dad called me an idiot, and neither of them ever mentioned it again. But Daisy was deeply disturbed by the sight of me.

I should have anticipated this. Her mind was already betraying her. When my dad would mention someone from their past, she would frown, trying desperately to conjure the memory of their face, getting frustrated when she couldn’t. She would swear—and Aunt Daisy never swore—and something about her voice sounded like a scared and angry little girl.

I could hear her arguing with Uncle Gary at night. She didn’t want to take the pills. She didn’t want to go her appointments. She didn’t want any of this. For her, nothing made sense quite the way it was supposed to.

And then I walk in, looking like a distorted version of myself, sporting a dramatically unflattering new look that she herself was partly responsible for. After all, she had bought me the razor. The way she kept looking at me, it was like I had betrayed her somehow. And then- she stopped looking. She started averting her eyes.

The morning we were set to leave, Daisy had a doctor’s appointment in town. I got up just in time to say goodbye. We all hugged her, but there was a distance to her. As Gary hurried her out the door and we called out our final Goodbyes and I-Love-You’s, she wouldn’t look at us. She wouldn’t look at me. She was huddled in her winter coat, her face deliberately turned away. She waved her hand at us like that, without looking, as she walked out the door.

Sometimes now, when I try to picture her face, all I see is the back of her head, her straight brown hair flung over the back of her puffy winter coat, her hand waving back at us carelessly. I never saw her again.

---

It was a very bad year. We lost Mom not long after Aunt Daisy passed, and Dad never recovered. We were all so swept away in our own grief that we didn’t worry too much about how Uncle Gary was doing. He was so far away in so many ways. We never did go back to see him in Robinson.

After Mom died, Dad’s health went pretty straight down the drain. Worst of all, he was so overwhelmed with loss that talking to him became painful. Every conversation turned to Mom, to “what a good woman” she was, to how much he missed her. He resisted any talk of the future. He wanted to die. That much was clear.

Dad lived long enough to see me get married. He didn’t care much for my bride, but I think he was proud of me nonetheless.

He pulled Alex and I aside and told us to be good to one another. “Someday, all you’ll have is each other,” he said.

“Jesus, Dad,” Alex said. “That’s morbid.”

“It’s true.”

It was. By the end of the year, his prophecy came true. We buried Dad, sold the house, donated almost everything in the house to charity, and left the small town we’d grown up in once and for all. We would never go back.

But Robinson is another story altogether.

---

I drive around town, from end to end, and we stare out the windows in awe, pointing at the familiar sights. The town is cornered by the “four pillars of Robinson,” as my dad used to call them. To the northeast is the Robinson Correctional Facility, the first prison I ever saw, and one my imagination did incredible things with as a young boy. To the southeast is the Marathon oil refinery. This was the mythical, hellish world where Gary spent a decent chunk of his life. On our walks, we could see the refinery in the distance, those ugly, towering structures, scaffolding and chimneys belching out flames. Somehow it always scared me more than the prison. A prison I could understand, even as a child. But a refinery was inexplicable and terrifying.

To the southwest is the Hershey factory. Along with the refinery, the factory probably accounts for 80% of the jobs in Robinson. And lastly, in the northwest corner of town is the Crawford County Memorial Hospital. Aunt Daisy died there, but I never saw the inside of it until Gary got sick.

I suggest going straight to the house, but Alex says she isn’t ready. It’s been a long day and she’d rather we just take it easy tonight. “What are you planning?” she asks, and something catches in my throat.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, like, do you just want to drive by the house, or do you want to… trespass?”

“I want to to look around, yeah.”

She nods like this is what she expected. “I’m fine with that. But let’s be careful about it.”

“Of course.”

“And let’s also go to that antique store in Palestine tomorrow, if we can.” 

“Yeah. Of course,” I say. “We definitely will.”

The moment passes and I breathe out a sigh of relief. What are you planning? I wonder if she knows, deep down. Despite what I’ve told her, I didn’t come here to relax or to reminisce or to reunite.

I came here to die.

Look for Part 3 of “Robinson” in your inbox next Sunday evening.