Into Thin Air (10 page)

He tried to keep a low profile. Disguising himself, he wore a baseball cap, and once dark shades, until his father embarrassed him further by asking loudly just who he thought he was, James Bond?

He had never been popular. He was thin and serious and so pale and blond, his mother had once been called into the school by a suspicious nurse who wanted to know if Jim ever was allowed outside in the sun. Despite his father's urging, when he bagged he didn't think about the store or displays; instead he dreamed about what he loved—science. He saw bacteria sprouting happily in a petri dish, amoebas swimming on a slide.

He was honest enough, telling Jack as gently as possible that he didn't want to run the business, that his father would be better off handing it down to a cousin or a box boy than to him. Both his parents had been astounded. “It's a good living,” his mother insisted. “You want a wife, a family, this is the way to go.” Astonished, his father had studied his son. “What is there to do instead?” he said.

“I don't know. Anything. Go to Paris.”

“Paris is just like New York City,” Jack said. “And nobody in their right mind wants to go to New York City.”

“I want to go to school,” Jim said.

“School? What for?” Jack said. “I couldn't wait to get out of school when I was your age.”

“I want to study chemistry. Be a doctor. Or a pharmacist, maybe,” Jim said.

“Listen to me,” Jack said. “Waste of time. You got a whole ready-made business here. You just forget it.”

Jim didn't forget. He didn't for a moment intend to take over the Top Thrift, and he didn't intend staying in Philadelphia, either. He made friends with Mrs. Fisk, a guidance counselor just out of school, so young and pretty it was rumored the captain of the football team had asked her out himself. She despaired of her job. The kids assigned to her came in grudgingly and only when she called them. They had their minds made up. How the hell could she know what courses were easy enough to sleep your way to an A, what schools might accept anyone who could legibly print their name? She knew they considered the whole guidance department a joke—a job someone who couldn't do anything else took on—and Jim's anxious interest and genuine need touched her deeply. “We have
ways
,” she said to Jim conspiratorially. She was the one who found the cheapest and best colleges for him to apply to, the one who had the catalogs sent directly to her so his parents wouldn't find out. She helped him with the financial aid applications, the scholarships. “Tell the truth,” she advised. “They know there are parents who don't want kids going to school.”

Jim began working longer hours at the Top Thrift, saving every cent he could into a special college account, for a future that didn't include mopping up broken glass in aisle one. Jack beamed. “That's the spirit,” he told Jim. “That's what I like to see.” He gave Jim a raise.

When he wasn't working and saving, Jim saw Lee. He brought her exotic fruits from the market, mangoes and kiwis. If she were supplied, he reasoned, she wouldn't need to steal.

Lee didn't understand why she kept dating Jim. He never so much as touched her, though she felt him watching her, and the only notoriety she gained from being with him was the disbelief of her peers. “You go out with Jim Archer?” her lab partner asked, shaking her head. “Excuse me for saying this, but I didn't think he
liked
girls.”

“He likes this one plenty,” Lee said coolly.

She continued to see other boys. Sometimes, on another date, though, she'd spot Jim, blurring past on his white bicycle, his hair dripping wet. The bicycle irritated her. Why couldn't he borrow his father's car? She encouraged Tony to vandalize the bike, but he laughed at her. “Too easy,” he said. Sometimes, too, she'd see Jim over at Boon's Burgers, hunched over a Coke and fries, talking animatedly to one of his friends, a boy always as chalky pale and drably dressed as he was, in chinos and some sort of madras shirt. She walked in, in a skirt too tight, a shimmery rayon blouse, hanging on to the arm of some boy, and when she saw him she struggled to make her smile as distant as the rings of Saturn. A flicker of pain crossed his face.

Despite herself, she began to count on him. Nights when she couldn't sleep, nights when Frank and Janet went out to a dinner she wasn't invited to, she would call him. He talked to her calmly. “God, the whole house to yourself, isn't that great?” he said. “No pressure, no tension, you can just be yourself.”

“It is nice,” Lee said, perking up a little.

He told her stories into the night. About a scientist in the 1870s who thought the moon craters were caused by swarms of lunar insects. He told her he thought time travel was probably possible, and he'd be the first one to volunteer to go into the future. “What about you?” he said. Without hesitating Lee said firmly, “I'd go to the past.”

It was ridiculously easy to make him happy. All she had to do was smile at him or thread her fingers into his. She didn't plan on the way he sometimes jammed into her thoughts. She could be doing the dinner dishes and then she'd suddenly think his name, his face would float into her mind. She didn't want to need him; she didn't like the way her stomach folded in upon itself when she couldn't find him at school or when he didn't call. And she didn't like the way he needed her.

She began seeing Tony again, breaking dates with Jim to whiz about town on the back of a motorcycle. “That boy again,” Frank said. “What, do you mean, that boy?” Lee said. Frank made her come out on the front lawn, where he showed her the tire marks from Tony's bike, greasy black slashes in the green yard.

Lee came home at one and two in the morning; she skipped classes and came to the dinner table with her eyes lined in frosted lilac, her lips streaked with a startling red. On her left arm she had a silver bracelet she had taken from a Woolworth's down the street. She hadn't told Frank she had been warned never to come back there, that a man had grabbed her arm just as she was leaving. All he had had to do was get her to take off her boot, where the bracelet was hidden, but he just made her empty her purse on a table in the back. “Don't come back,” he told her. But sometimes Lee did, and always she left with a pair of glass earrings, or a chiffon scarf, or a packet of sewing needles she didn't even want. She'd come home and then make herself baths so hot, she was certain it would burn the restlessness right out of her.

One night Lee stayed out with Tony until three in the morning drinking rum and Cokes from a plaid thermos bottle. “I love you,” Tony said, making Lee laugh so much, it angered him. “What, what's the matter?” he said fiercely. “You think that's funny?” He drove her home speechless with fury.

When Jim called to ask her out, when he mentioned how happy he was to be with her, she sniped at him. “Hah, you think that's happy,” she said. She planned to talk to him, to let him know he couldn't own her, That night he drove to the lake, the air so clear and cold, it seemed to freeze the light around them. “I have a surprise for you,” he said. For one moment she was afraid that he was going to take the clumsy gold ring from his finger and drop it into her palm. She curled her fingers inward, she folded her arms about her. Instead, though, he got out of the car. “Just wait,” he said, She pulled down the rearview mirror and blinked at her reflection in the mirror. “Okay,” he said, getting back in, holding up a slim glass bottle.

“Champagne,” he said. “Château de Top Thrift.” He gave her the bottle and opened up the glove compartment and took out two glasses, wrapped in lavender tissue paper. “Waterford crystal,” he said, handing one glass to Lee, “courtesy of my mother,” He opened the champagne with a pop, ceremoniously pouring her a glass. Gamely Lee took a sip. Metal in her mouth. An edge of tin. “Wait, wait,” he said, pouring himself a glass and clinking it against hers. “To us,” he said. “Happy days,” said Lee.

He kept pouring the two of them wine, and at first he just watched her as she sipped. The champagne tasted flat. She couldn't drink any more of it without feeling ill. Jim poured wine into her empty glass. He was drinking more than she was, downing each glass with a glad, exaggerated sigh.

He listed toward her, touching the side of her face with one finger.

“I see things just as clearly drunk as sober,” Lee said. The hand retracted. It moved to the wine; it poured another full glass. Lee stared at the sky through her empty wineglass.

“You want to take a walk?” Lee asked.

Jim studied his glass of wine. “I fell in love with you the first time I saw you.” He looked at her, pinning her in his gaze. “I must have because every single moment after that I felt different.”

“Don't say that,” Lee said. She swung her legs outside and then stood in the night, arms clapped about her.

From a distance she heard Jim's voice. “I never loved anyone before. I never even liked anyone enough to ask them out. My father thinks I'm socially retarded.” He laughed and then stopped himself. “I don't go out with anyone else. But you…you're always with someone new. Why aren't I enough?”

Lee resettled herself into the car. “You think anybody's ever enough for anybody?” she said, “I've never seen that to be the case.”

He took a long miserable swig from his glass, “You're enough for me,” he said.

“Hah. You think that now,” Lee said.

He poured himself more wine. “I'll always think it.”

“It's late. I need to get home.”

They drove in silence. The road was flat and gray as slate, and Jim began humming something low and tuneless in his throat, and even though he wasn't looking at her at all, Lee felt him somehow surrounding her, and she shifted uncomfortably on her seat. They were almost home. It wasn't even eleven, wasn't even within an hour of her curfew, when a police car snaked out from around a bend. Red light, a bulb on top of the car flashing, a hand waving them over to the side. “Oh, shit,” Jim said.

There were two policemen, both middle-aged, but only one got out, lumbering toward them, Jim sat very straight, eyes focused at a point in the distance.

It was only a broken taillight, but it didn't take the cop long to smell the alcohol on Jim's breath, to lean over and sniff it on Lee, like a kind of rare perfume. “You kids just never learn, do you,” he said flatly. “Don't they teach you anything in driver's ed?” He made them get out of the car and blow into a balloon, the whole time shaking his head at them. He scribbled out a ticket and handed it to Jim with the utmost disgust. “Get in the squad car,” he said.

The whole way to the station, he lectured the two of them. Drunk driving. Jim could lose his license for a fool stunt like that. He could have lost their lives—or someone else's. You were damn lucky,” he said. “Goddamned lucky. I'm sure your parents will have something to say about this. If I were your father, you'd be lucky if I let you on a bicycle.”

Lee felt a thrill of fear. “I'll be grounded forever,” she said to Jim. “No, you won't,” he said, reaching for the hand she had tucked, small and stubborn, into her pocket.

The station was brightly lit and dead quiet. The two cops said something in low voices to the desk sergeant. “Not again,” the desk sergeant said wearily, inspecting Jim and Lee. “Sit,” he ordered. “I'm calling your folks, not you. It seems to make more of an impression that way.”

“Oh, God,” Jim said, washing one hand over his face. He looked a little green; his whole body seemed to be crumpling.

“‘Oh, God' is right,” the desk sergeant said, and Jim promptly vomited on the floor.

They sat on a heavy wood bench, waiting for their parents. Jim was huddled over, his face folded into a damp washcloth. Lee, only a little drunk, put one hand on his shoulder. “Don't touch, I'll be sick again,” he said, panicked.

Frank had arrived first, striding in with Janet behind him, pinning Lee in his sights. He whispered something to the cop and then, before he got to Lee, crouched down toward Jim. “Another one I don't know,” Frank said. “Where does she get these guys?” Jim lifted the cloth from his face, staring woozily at Frank's stabbing finger. “You go near my daughter again and I'll kill you. You understand that word, kill, or are you too drunk and stupid?” Jim's mouth, fishlike, gaped open. Frank clenched Lee's bare arm and yanked her upward. She tottered on new suede heels, trying to brace herself on Frank's shoulder, but he pulled back, striking her face. Her neck snapped forward; she stumbled. Jim's hands flashed, grabbing for an edge of Lee's shirt, clamping on stale station air. “Honey,” Frank said, beckoning Janet.

On the drive home Lee sat in between Frank and Janet. “You reek of cheap wine,” Frank said angrily, but after that no one said a single word. The radio remained silent. Frank parked the car in the drive and walked ahead of them, and as soon as he opened the front door, he disappeared into the study, closing the door firmly. Janet put two hands on Lee's shoulders. “You see the state your father's in?” she demanded. “You're going to give him a heart attack.”

That night Lee sat up in a thin white nightgown. Something scuttled in her stomach, and she doubled herself over on the bed, head in her hands. She heard the lights clicking shut, the sounds any house made settling, but as much as she strained, she couldn't shape a single murmur coming from Frank and Janet's room, and it somehow scared her.

Morning, Hung over. Her head warring with her stomach, she gingerly dressed for school. In the mirror her face looked as if the features had softened and blurred. Sickened, she smelled eggs frying.

Janet, a blue apron around a red dress, a single pink sponge curler in her bangs, nodded at Lee. Frank dunked his toast into his coffee and nodded at his daughter. “Were you sick last night?” he said. “I thought I heard you.”