"Looking" by Roxana Robinson
We can’t wait to read Roxana Robinson’s new novel, Leaving, due out on February 13th. Robinson is long-time friend of Epiphany, whose work we first published in our Summer / Fall 2008 issue. Leaving was selected as one of Oprah Daily’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024. They describe it as “an impassioned portrayal of desire and loyalty, of romantic love and family duty, and an exploration into what we owe to each other—and to ourselves.”
You can pre-order it here.
And here’s Robinson’s beautiful story from the Epiphany archive.
“I have the feeling he’s right nearby,” Julia said. She was looking out the car window, watching people walk past on the sidewalk. “I can feel him.”
Julia was in her ex-husband’s car. The two of them were cruising Brooklyn, looking for their son. This had been Julia’s idea. She’d felt urgent when she’d called Wendell, desperate in fact, but now, driving aimlessly around in the vastness of Brooklyn, she felt urgency begin- ning to seep away, dissipating through frustration, which was what always happened, dealing with Jack. As though she were groping through fog.
Nearing the neighborhood where Jack had last had an actual address, the light was beginning to fade and the low shabby buildings were turning shadowy. The streetlights had come on.
“Let’s try that apartment where he was last summer,” Wendell said.
“But he shouldn’t be there, should he?” Julia said. “He has a whole new life. He’s not seeing any of his old friends. Isn’t that what he told us?”
Wendell said nothing.
“I wish Steven were here,” Julia said. Steven was their older son, twenty-four, two years older than Jack.
“I wish Steven were speaking to us,” Wendell said.
“I wish Jack were still at the half-way house,” Julia said. Wendell snorted. “Wish.”
Winding slowly through the streets, Wendell pulled up before a row of low seedy residential buildings. He parked at a hydrant; they got out and he locked the car.
“That’s it,” Wendell said, nodding. The building was brick, set slightly back from the street. Broken pavement crossed the unkempt lawn.
In the small foyer Wendell looked at the names. None of them was Jack’s.
“I think this is it.” He pushed a buzzer. They waited in silence. Wendell rang again. The door was pushed suddenly open from inside by a young man in a dirty parka, who pushed quickly past them. “Thanks,” Wendell said, and caught the door. Without answering, the man hurried down the steps and into the darkness.
The hall was dimly lit, and smelled of mold. They climbed to the second floor, where the walls were a dirty yellow. The floor was gritty and unswept, and there was a bad smell. Wendell stopped at a door and knocked. Julia held her breath. Inside they heard a television, the squeals of a high-speed car chase, the syncopated rattle of gunfire. Wendell gazed at the door handle, as though he could make it move through concentration.
“Even if he’s there, why would he come to the door?” Julia whispered.
Wendell knocked again.
“Maybe we should have gotten a policeman to come with us,” Julia said.
“You can’t just ask for a policeman for an evening,” Wendell said. “It’s not like hiring a waiter.”
“He’s jumping bail,” Julia said. “It’s illegal. Doesn’t anyone care?”
“Day after tomorrow, in Maine, they’ll care if he’s not in court,” Wendell said. “But you can’t tell a policeman in Brooklyn to go after a bail-jumper from Maine.”
“We have to find him,” Julia said. She’d put up her ancient farm- house in Maine for his bail. It was the only property on earth she owned. She had to find him, she had to save her house. And to save his life, of course, though she’d been trying to do this, to save his life, for years, years.
She felt suddenly mortally exhausted, as though she were physically wearing herself out, as though she were rubbing her soul against something solid and abrasive, wearing herself thinner and thinner, using herself up. She had used up her reservoir of urgency. “We have to find him.”
Wendell knocked again, the percussive sound filling the hallway. Behind them they heard footsteps, descending the stairs. A tiny woman came into view, grey-haired and untidy. She moved slowly and cumbersomely, using a cane, and setting both feet on each step. She wore a shabby green coat, buttoned wrong, the hem slanting asymmetrically over her heavy black shoes. She pulled her coat tighter across her chest when she saw them.
“Don’t go in there,” she said shrilly. “They’re junkies. They’ll steal anything you have. They took my cat food last week.”
Julia frowned and said nothing. Wendell knocked again. The woman watched them, bright-eyed and accusatory, stepping painstakingly from stair to stair. When she reached the hallway she waved her cane at them.
“I’m telling you,” the woman said, her voice rising, “They’ll take the fillings outa your teeth.”
Julia looked at Wendell. He turned the doorknob.
The woman made her way, rocking with each step, across the hall to the top of the stairs.
Julia said quietly to Wendell, “No one’s there.”
He didn’t answer. He leaned close to the door and knocked again, now with the heel of his fist, loud and authoritative.
The doorknob turned suddenly and the door opened. A man stared at them through the crack.
“What is it?” He was in his thirties, with a wide balding head. He was unshaven, and the hair he had left was long and unkempt. There were gaps among his teeth.
“We’re looking for Jack Lambert,” Wendell said.
“We’re his parents,” Julia said, smiling hard. “He’s not in any trouble. We just want to make sure he’s okay.”
“Don’t know him.” The man breathed with his mouth open. “He was living here,” Julia said.
“I came to see him here last summer,” Wendell said. “Not here now.” The man rubbed suddenly at his eyes. “He’s in his twenties—” Wendell began.
“Here’s a photograph of him.” Julia had it ready, and held it out.
The picture was from several summers ago, in Maine. Jack was at the dock, tilting his head and grinning, squinting in the sun. Tanned and beaming, the water glittering behind him.
The man glanced down and shook his head. “Never seen him before.”
Julia looked at the picture. “He looks different now,” she said. “You might not recognize him from this.” She wondered, now, how he looked. Not like this.
“Don’t know him,” the man said again. His tongue moved among the gaps in his teeth, bulging obscenely.
“Whose apartment is this?” Wendell asked.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “None of your business whose apartment this is. I don’t let strangers come in and ask questions, okay?” He started to close the door. “I don’t know who you’re looking for, but he’s not here.”
Julia slipped her fingers around the frame, so he’d have to crush them to shut the door. “Please,” she said, “I’m his mother. Please just listen to us.”
The door remained ajar.
Julia looked at Wendell. “What’s his name? Jack’s friend who lived here? Who was it?” She looked back at the man through the crack. “Russ,” she said. “His friend Russ lived here last summer. Is he here now?”
The man shook his head. “Not here.”
“But you know him, right? Our son used to play in a band with Russ.” Julia hoped that was right. Please, she thought, please, please. “We just need to see him for a moment. We just need to talk to him. We won’t make trouble.”
“Not here,” said the man. “Look, lady, I can’t help you. I don’t know your son. Russ isn’t here. I’m closing the door, so move your fucking hand.”
Julia felt wood against her knuckles, and she drew away her fingers.
The bald man looked past them, down the hall. The old woman had stalled at the top step of the stairs, and was staring at them. He shouted, “Get out of here, you old bat, before I rip your legs off!”
“Shut your mouth, you sick piece of trash,” the woman muttered, but she kept her voice low. She turned and started laboriously down the stairs, cane first.
When Julia looked at the door again, it was closed.
Back in the car, Julia asked, “Should we have hired a detective?
Maybe that’s what we should have done.”
“Maybe we should just take all our money and throw it off the Brooklyn Bridge,” Wendell said. He switched on the headlights. It was night.
“What does Sandra think?” Julia asked. Sandra was Wendell’s wife, and a therapist.
“Sandra thinks what everyone thinks: we’re doing everything that can be done. Christ. We’ve done it all: the intervention, the rehab, the half-way programs, the outpatient rehabs. The jobs, the therapy. What have we missed? A stint at Guantánamo? Rendition?”
He pulled out into the street. A brick warehouse stood on the corner, sealed and shut for the night. A dog hurried across the street, thin and furtive, its whiplike tail tucked between its legs.
“All these pit bulls,” Julia said, suddenly indignant. “It’s sickening. They train them to fight, and if they don’t win then they abandon them. They’re all over the place.” The dog disappeared between two parked cars, emerged into the light again to cross the sidewalk and then vanished into an alley. “It’s sickening,” she said again.
“Julia,” Wendell said.
“Sometimes I think we aren’t doing everything.” Julia put her hands in her lap, palms up. She stared down at them. “Sometimes I wake up thinking there’s something else, something just . . . right on the tip of my tongue, I can almost get it. I have the feeling there’s one more thing I should be doing, something I haven’t thought of yet.
“It’s like finding something in the last place you look: I’m trying to think of the one thing we haven’t tried yet, that will cure him. I chase it around in my mind in circles.”
“Sometimes I just want to hire a hit man, to go and get him,” Wendell said. “I just want it to be over. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy: there’s no answer to this.”
“Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel as though I shouldn’t do anything else in my life, anything at all, except try to cure him. I shouldn’t go to the movies, or have dinner with Simon, or paint, or teach, or eat or sleep. I shouldn’t do anything at all, nothing except try to find him and help him. Make him stop. That’s my task.” She gave a tiny snort of helplessness. “But I can’t even find him, let alone help him.”
There was a pause.
“We have to do something about Steven,” Wendell said.
“I can’t think about Steven,” Julia said. “I can’t even think his name. I can’t even get to the idea of Steven, because Jack’s there first. If I even think about Steven I feel I’m being disloyal to Jack.”
“Yeah,” Wendell said. “Sandra says we have to do something about him, though.”
“I know,” said Julia. “She’s right. But I can’t.”
“I have the feeling we’re losing him, Steven,” Wendell said. “He’s kind of drifting away.”
Julia shook her head helplessly. “I can’t. I can’t do both. I know you’re right. The last time I talked to him it was as though we couldn’t hear each other. But I can’t do it. I have nothing left right now.” She looked out the window. “Do you remember where the dealer lives? That woman you told me about?”
“I think I can find it,” said Wendell.
“I keep thinking I see him, Jack, everywhere,” Julia said. “My mind tries to turn every figure I see into his, anyone, even little kids, girls, black people, I sort of mentally compose their shapes into his.
“It’s like that time last summer, when they were in the boat and ran out of gas, Steven and Jack, and we went out looking for them. I kept thinking I saw them, I kept staring into the dark and making images of the boat and their bodies, out of fog and waves.” She laughed shortly. “Remember how scary that was? My god, it was so simple. It was just a boat out in the fog. All we had to do was find them and they were safe.” She sighed. “Jesus.”
“I think it’s this block.”
The shabby storefronts were sealed shut, corrugated metal shutters drawn down to the sidewalk, padlocked for the night.
“Heavy drug use,” Julia said. “Those shutters.”
“What?” Wendell asked.
“Where there’s a high rate of drug use, shops put up those metal shutters. Junkies break through plate glass windows.”
“We know that.”
Jack had demonstrated that in Maine, the summer before, when he broke the window of a drugstore at three o‘clock in the morning. The felony was the reason he was required to appear in court, the reason the house had been put up for bail. His heroin habit was the reason they had sent him to rehab in Florida, the halfway house, the community programs, therapy. The reason they no longer heard from him, after they stopped giving him money.
Wendell looked up at a row of dingy brick buildings. “It’s one of these. What if we find him and he won’t come with us?”
“He has to,” Julia said, suddenly ferocious. “I’m taking him to Maine if I have to carry him on my back.”
Wendell turned the wheel hard and began backing into a tiny illegal slot. “Okay,” he said. “Get ready.”
The foyer was tiny, with scarred grey walls. The floor was littered with Chinese restaurant flyers. The lock on the front door was heavily reinforced with metal plates, but the door itself stood slightly ajar. They went inside. There was no light, and they started gingerly upstairs in the dark.
On the third floor Wendell led Julia down the hall. At the back of the building was a heavy door with a peephole. They heard loud pounding music inside. Wendell knocked hard, and after a moment the music was turned down. Wendell knocked a second time. They heard approaching footsteps, then a rustling, intimate sound, as someone looked at them through the peephole.
“Who is it?” A low voice, like a man’s.
“Hi, I’m Jack Lambert’s father,” Wendell said, smiling ingratiatingly at the peephole. “I came here with him last summer.”
“He’s not here,” the voice said.
“Dana, right? I paid you what he owed,” Wendell said. “Remember?”
“He’s not here,” she said again.
“Please,” Julia said, peering in at the peephole. “I’m his mother.
Please just talk to us. Please.”
There was a pause. The music was turned lower and the door opened a crack. A skinny dark-haired woman stared out at them, square-jawed and gimlet-eyed. “He’s not here.”
“But have you seen him? We need to talk to him,” Julia said. “I’m afraid something’s happened to him.”
“He hasn’t been here,” the woman said. She stared at them without blinking.
“Please,” Julia said. “Please let us in.” Something was mounting inside her.
“Don’t get crazy,” the woman said. “He hasn’t been here. I can’t help you.”
“Don’t do this,” Julia said. “Don’t do this to us.” “I’m not doing anything to you,” the woman said. Her eyes narrowed.
“Julia,” Wendell said.
“Please,” Julia said, “please help us. We have to find him. I know you used to see him, I mean you used— we’re not here to make trouble, we just want to find him. Please, please just let us in, please just talk to us. We have nowhere else to go.”
“You think if I let you in I’d know where he is, but I’m telling you I don’t,” the woman said. “I haven’t seen him. I can’t help you.” She shut the door and they heard the locks turning.
“Oh, please,” Julia called through the door. “Please help us.”
There was no answer, and Julia leaned her face against the heavy door and began to cry, though she had sworn, sworn, sworn to herself that on this expedition she would not cry. She began to cry, low in her throat, and her whole body began to tremble. Wendell put his hand on her shoulder, and then he put his arms around her. They stood together on the dark landing. Julia put her arms around him, and they held each other. The music inside was turned up again. It was pounding and loud, deep, internal, like the terrible rumble of tanks.
When they reached the car they got in and shut the doors. Wendell did not turn on the engine. Julia blew her nose and wiped her face and sighed.
“I don’t know what to do next,” she said. “What shall we do? Drive around? Do you think she was telling the truth?” Wendell shrugged. “She has nothing to gain by telling us anything. If he’d been there ten minutes ago, why would she tell us? Everything about drugs is illegal. No one will tell us anything. All these people are in their own kind of trouble.” He looked out his window. “I don’t know how to find him. Nobody knows anything. He hasn’t been at the last half-way house in weeks.”
They sat in silence. A bodega stood on the corner, and colored lights from its window spilled out onto the sidewalk. The door opened and two Latina girls came out, wearing long wool coats over jeans. They started walking away fast, leaning toward each other, their shoulders touching.
“I’m going to lose the house,” Julia said. Wendell said nothing.
“I wouldn’t mind if it were in exchange for something—if it were in exchange for him. If he’d quit, I’d be glad to give up the house.” She shook her head. “It’s such a fucking waste to give it up for nothing.”
“What part of this is not a fucking waste?” asked Wendell. “What part of this is constructive and useful? What part of it is another aspect of the long, natural, difficult but rewarding task of being a parent? What the fuck is this for? Why did it happen? What good is it? Are we meant to learn something from it?” He looked out. A streetlamp stood nearby, haloing the darkness, gleaming on the parked cars beneath it. Within yards from it there was dimness. “It’s not like a disease,” he said, “or a car accident: random bad luck, part of the natural laws of the universe. This is entirely volitional. It could be stopped. This whole situation can be completely reversed, only we can’t make that happen.” He shook his head. “It’s like an exercise in existential torture: our punishment is to sit for eternity and watch our son destroy himself.”
“Without eyelids,” said Julia, “unable to blink. And it’s full-time. I have this sense that if I’m thinking of him, I’m helping him. I have to be always on duty. And I’m turning into a madwoman: I get angry so easily. I can’t believe the stupidity of what my friends talk about: a problem student, a sweater the cleaners shrank. I feel enraged, just to listen to it. And if anyone’s five minutes late meeting me, or if they haven’t done what they said they’d do, I want to tear them apart. I’m turning into a monster.”
“Yeah. It sucks. All of it.” Wendell sighed. “This is what’s called ruining your life.” He sat without moving, looking out into the city night. “So. It’s nearly seven o‘clock. We may as well have dinner. Do you want to get something to eat someplace around here? We might run into him.”
“I want to stay here until I find him,” said Julia. “I have to find him to take him to Maine. I can’t leave. I want to walk up and down every street.”
“We can do that,” Wendell said, nodding.
“I have this feeling that he’s right nearby,” Julia said. “He’s just one block over from wherever we are, moving parallel to us. He’s within shouting distance. I can feel it.”
She opened the car door and leaned out into the darkness. “Jack!” she shouted. “Jack!”
She stayed motionless, holding onto the door handle, listening.
She called his name again. “Jack Lambert!”
She remembered the night they were out looking for the boat, when they were calling out across the waves to their sons. The call, then the long pause for the answer. Now she called again, louder, more serious. Wendell, beside her, did not move.
Rounding the corner behind them, Jack stopped, at the sound of his name. He saw the small car parked at the curb, someone leaning out the open door. He heard his name called again. He recognized the voice.
He drew back into the shadows of the building and turned sideways, hunching his shoulders and ducking his chin beneath the collar of his jacket. He watched Julia, leaning against the door, motionless. She called his name again.
The words came at him like weapons. Jack glanced around. A bearded black man with a knitted cap was walking by, paying no attention. No one noticed the call, no one realized it was his name, that he was Jack. Still it was like weapons, knives thrown at him. His mother waited, holding onto the open door. Jack waited, shifting from foot to foot in the cold. He sniffed largely: doper’s drip. Was that his father in the driver’s seat? It was. His parents were parked outside his dealer’s.
Rage rose up in him: they had no business here. This was his place, his territory, they should get out. The universe was dark enough, filled with his shadows. He could hear footsteps on the sidewalk. He hated that, the pock-pock on the sidewalk, like the horror of an approaching clock. The sound filled up the cavity of his chest. His heart was ready to tear itself from his body, he felt it pounding dangerously in there. No one could come near him, he couldn’t risk anyone approaching him. Panic flapped its huge leathery wings about his head and he shut his eyes. The world tipped slowly on its axis, slanting horribly away from under his feet. He could feel its shift: in a moment he’d fall off the curving side of the planet, dropping into black gravityless space. He felt himself losing his balance and opened his eyes. Slowly the planet righted itself. He looked around, in the shadows, but there was no evidence: no slanted buildings, no toppled trash cans. But it was real, he’d felt it in his body, the vertigo, the fear. There was nothing that was safe, nothing. You were on your own. He heard the pock-pock of the footsteps again, approaching him.
Maybe he should walk over to their car and offer to clean their windshield for twenty bucks. Maybe he should just ask them for money, straight out. But they’d stopped giving him money.
There was something he remembered, about going up to Maine: it was the fucking trial. That’s why they were here. His mother wanted to take him up to Maine for his trial. He’d shoot his foot off first. He’d shoot her foot off.
He stood in the shadows and watched them, chin behind the collar of his jacket. It was getting cold.
They had no right to be here, in Brooklyn. On his own block, one of his blocks, his territory: right in front of his dealer’s. He was cold. He’d sold his parka, and all he had was this fucking windbreaker he’d found in a bin. He was cold, and he needed dope, and he could feel the world swirling around him. He felt the air fill up with menace. It was in his throat, he felt the choke of it in his throat.
Two young black men, in black parkas and knit caps, walked toward him on the sidewalk. As they neared, one of them glanced at him. His eyes were bulging, the whites liquid and brilliant.
His heart thundered in his chest. Everything now was perilous. The air was full of glittering blades. What he could not see, what was just beyond the corner of his eye, was deadly. How long were they going to sit there in their car, waiting for him to walk by? He should go over and tell them to get out of here. He hated having them here.
“I think he’s everywhere,” Julia said. She pulled the door closed. “I keep seeing him. I think he’s that guy over there on the corner, the one with his back to us, in the windbreaker. He looks like a bum, but Jack probably looks like a bum now.” She turned to Wendell. “How long do we go on with this? I don’t mean looking for him, I mean the whole thing. How long do we just—pursue it?”
Wendell didn’t turn. “What choice do we have?”
“Sometimes I just wish it were over, just over, any way. I can’t stand this,” Julia said. She leaned back against the seat. “I just wish he’d end it.”
“I know. I feel like he’s taken over our lives as well as his.”
“Every day I think about this,” Julia said. “While I’m teaching, if the door opens in the middle of class I look up and think, It’s happened. Every time the phone rings I’m afraid to answer. But I can’t wait to answer, I have to know right away. I can’t stand to be alone, but I don’t want to see anyone. I can’t concentrate on anything. I can’t sleep. I take a pill and sleep for two or three hours, then I watch TV. I can’t even concentrate on that. I’m just waiting. I’m waiting all the time.”
Wendell leaned back against his own seat. “It’s like that for me, too. But I’m angry all the time. Sandra tells me to calm down.” He shook his head. “She has a lot of advice for me, but it’s not her son. What does she know? How can I stop thinking about it? I can’t take a break.” He tapped his thumb against the steering wheel. “We fight about it. I’m getting angry at her, too.” He paused. “I don’t know, we might not make it.”
“You and Sandra? Because of this?”
“I’m sick of having her tell me how to deal with it. I’m sick of having her there all the time.” Wendell tapped the steering wheel again. He glanced at Julia. “She looks like a dog. Did you ever notice that?”
“A dog?” Julia felt guilty, as though she had put this thought into Wendell’s head.
“A terrier. The bright eyes, that pointy little nose. I keep wanting to check and see if her nose is damp. Actually,” Wendell said, folding his arms, “I don’t want to touch her.”
“Oh, god,” Julia said. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” said Wendell moodily. “It’s too bad. But you have some new guy, right?”
She nodded. “I sort of do. Simon. He’s a mathematician. He’s very nice, he’s great, in fact. But he doesn’t understand any of this. He’s never met Jack. I don’t want him to see Jack while he’s like this, I want him to wait until he can meet the real Jack.”
The night had darkened around them. The street had turned black. Along the edge of the sidewalk were dirty scraps of frozen slush. On the upper floors of the buildings dim lights shone from the windows. A drug lord drove past in an S.U.V., the windows darkened, music blasting and pulsing.
“I want the old Jack back,” Julia said. “I keep waiting. I can’t get off the ground with Simon. I can’t concentrate on that, either. I know he won’t wait around forever, but I just can’t focus on him. I can’t have sex. I feel as though, if I let myself think about Simon, if I let myself fall in love with him, if I stop concentrating, for one night, or for one minute, on Jack, I might lose him. Jack has to be in my mind every second, or he’ll be lost.
“So I don’t know what will happen with Simon,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen about anything.”
“I’m sorry about the house,” Wendell said.
“I can’t think about the house,” Julia said. “The house is the least of it, of everything. And in a weird way it feels like a bargain: if I lose the house, I get him back.”
“Goddamn him,” Wendell said, his voice low and fervent. “I know,” Julia said.
They sat without speaking. A black woman walked quickly past them, wearing a long coat and pushing a stroller.
The man on the corner waited, his chin tucked under the collar of his windbreaker, freezing, furious. And here it was again, that pock- pock, the devil coming up the sidewalk, toward him.
Roxana Robinson is the author of ten books—six novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland, and Spain. She is the recipient of many awards, the most recent the Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers” Award, from Poets & Writers.
