Into Thin Air (13 page)

David now had his face tilted toward the porch, and when he saw Jim looking at him, he stepped forward instead of back. “Want to see something wonderful?” Jim said.

“Like what?” David said.

Jim was so happy that one of the kids finally spoke to him that he laughed. “Oh, planets,” he said. He gestured at the sky. “Stars.”

David shrugged. “I don't care,” he said, but he climbed the stairs.

“Okay, you look here,” Jim directed, positioning the telescope to David's eye level. “No, just one eye. You close the other one.”

David squinted into the lens. He was perfectly still, his breath even. “Well, sometimes it takes time to see anything,” Jim said, trying to be kind. “You almost have to train yourself.” He moved to take the telescope, to focus on the moon, so inescapable, anyone could see it. He moved his hand, but David's fingers whipped toward Jim's, “It's gorgeous,” he breathed, and Jim stepped back, David didn't say a single thing. He didn't move from the telescope until his mother's voice cried out, calling him home. “You come back anytime,” Jim told him. “I mean it. Anytime.”

David came back the next night, and the night after, and then he began bringing kids with him.

Jim loved the kids. He tried patiently to teach them a little something about the stars. He spread out old star maps on the porch. He gave away paste-on constellations that glowed in the dark. More and more of the kids began hanging out at the Archers' porch. Usually they stayed less than an hour and then they'd return home, waltzing lazily back into their living rooms to announce to their stunned parents that the light from a star was dead light. They mentioned quarks and black holes and white holes. “Well, now,” parents said. They didn't like to feel shown up, but it was better having their kids looking at stars and quoting Einstein than ringing doorbells and running.

It was funny. The kids made Jim feel somehow older, more responsible. He credited them with making his voice stronger, his movements more sure; they did something entirely different for Lee. She may not have been comfortable with the other women in the neighborhood, but she was at home with the girls. For the first time since he had known her, she giggled. She sprawled out on the front porch and happily played jacks with the girls. “I did not cheat!” he heard her say, laughing. She had hated the one time he had washed her hair for her. He had thought it would be erotic, but she complained of soap in her eyes. She said his fingers felt like tarantulas crawling over her scalp. She didn't mind the girls doing it for her. She let them roll her wet hair on pink spongy curlers. They fought for the brush.

Jim found it odd how the girls treated Lee. It wasn't with the kind of respect he thought a married woman deserved, but she never seemed to mind. The kids called him “Mr. Archer,” but they called Lee “Lee.” Girls teased her and called her names and socked her in the arm at the punch line of a joke. It was odder still to come home and find his wife pinwheeling across the front yard in a game of freeze tag. She careened right into him with a sharp surprised intake of breath, Her flowered top fell off one shoulder. Her knees were scabbed and dirty, and her hair was tied into braids, She looked fifteen.

“You ought to get some friends,” he told her that evening. “Someone your own age.”

“I talk to plenty.”

“Who?” he said. “Who do you talk to? The other waitresses? The women on the block? You tell me who.”

She looped her arms about his shoulders. “I talk to you,” she said finally.

“You need some friends,” he said again.

“Oh, is that who needs that?” she said.

He pushed out a breath. He could want more for her all he wanted, but she would always seem to want less.

The boys sometimes trailed Lee, mesmerized. They had never seen anyone who looked like her, who smelled the way she did, When Lee began to get bigger with pregnancy, though, the boys began to avoid her. When they saw her on the porch, her stomach swelling against a cheap cotton shirt, they talked to her feet. They still idled over Jim's telescope, but those were old toys now, and they were all a little bored. Lee was moodier now, and the girls, who were more excited by her now that she was pregnant, began to chafe against her, She crouched under the brush they tried to put to her hair, and then jerked herself free, “My hair hurts,” she complained. The smell of nail polish and lipstick now made her so ill that she wouldn't allow the girls to bring any over or to play with hers. She didn't want to play freeze tag anymore. The very sound of the jacks ball hitting the porch seemed to reverberate unpleasantly inside of her. The girls began tightening their circle, three or four of them talking while Lee sat off by herself, cradling her knees. And then, after a while, the girls stopped coming over.

Lee never talked much about how she felt. Once or twice one of the other women would call out to her and ask if the baby had kicked yet. “I guess,” Lee said, not realizing how such an answer might shock. And sometimes Jim would see her on the porch, staring out at the street, her back to him, and when he put one hand on her shoulder, meaning to soothe, she jumped back, terrified, as if he had meant to hurt her.

3

The evening of Lee's disappearance from the hospital, a half hour before the police were contacted, Jim was speeding down the hospital corridor, a red velvet box of chocolates tucked under one arm. It was dinnertime. Candy stripers nudged shiny steel meal carts through the corridors. Faint plumes of steam spiraled from under the covered steel dishes. One of the candy stripers looked frankly at Jim. “Nobody brings
me
no candy,” she flirted, but Jim didn't even smile.

He was exhausted, a little stunned from the hard bright heat outside. He hadn't eaten all day, and he was drained from the three hours of exams he had just finished. Thank God, though, school was all out of the way now. He had the whole long lazy summer to spend with Lee and the baby.

He had almost not taken his exams. He kept thinking he shouldn't leave the hospital, that he should be with his wife.

“Come on, she's sleeping,” Lee's doctor said.

Lee's doctor's name was Anna Leighton. She had short spiky black hair and red lipstick she kept biting off, Lee had found her by stabbing a finger into the Yellow Pages. Jim had liked her because the whole time of Lee's pregnancy, Anna had made herself available to him, Anna didn't seem to see anything strange about Jim's calling her to find out why Lee's fingers and feet were swelling; why Lee sometimes had nightmares so terrible, she'd refuse to go back to sleep. Anna was warm and calm amid the damp waves of Jim's panic. She never asked to speak to Lee when Jim had phoned her, although she always reminded Jim to tell Lee that Lee could call anytime, that no question was too stupid, and she never seemed to hold it against Lee that Lee didn't.

When Jim had persisted in asking if Lee's deep sleep was normal, Anna became annoyed, In truth she was still a little irritated with him for trying to keep barging into the delivery room after Lee had shouted at him to get out. It just made it harder for Lee, who was panicked enough. Fathers sometimes fainted in delivery rooms; they sometimes were a nuisance. She herself had delivered over a thousand babies that she praised and cuddled and loved for the few minutes she held them, but because of the behavior of a few fathers, she couldn't imagine herself having one.

Jim couldn't wait for Lee to wake, She had been so nerved up during her pregnancy. She didn't want him telling his parents until after the baby was born. “I can't handle visitors right now,” she said. “Stop worrying,” he had soothed her. “We have enough money. We're going to be fine.” He had worked hard trying to show her what a great father he was going to be. He was the one who spent hours mixing shade after shade of yellow, who painstakingly glued glow-in-the-dark silver stars on the ceiling so the baby would look up and wonder over the Milky Way. He went to Baby World himself between classes and bought the small white crib and the changing table; he bought the mobile and the baby dresser with a parade of pastel ducks across it. He'd stand in the center of the room and swear he heard the baby. If he concentrated, he could smell the sweet, sharp tang; he could feel talcum powder sifting through the air. He grasped Lee's arm. “Just come in there and stand with me.” But she wouldn't stay for long, and he never understood it. “Don't you like it?” he asked her.

“It's bad luck,” she said.

“No, no, it's good,” he insisted, but after that he didn't press. She was anxious enough.

He didn't believe in bad luck. None of it had scared or worried him up until the moment Lee went into labor. He couldn't help her—no matter what he did, how he held her or touched her or panted helplessly along with her, none of it made one bit of difference. When she had shouted at him to get out, get out, he had moved closer to her. Lee's nurse had gently taken Jim by the arm and shepherded him to a chair outside.

“Listen,” she soothed, She looked to be his mother's age, and it suddenly comforted him. “Hard labor doesn't mean a hard birth, I popped mine out like kittens.” He blinked at her. “She'll be fine,” she said, patting his hand. “And so will you.” She had lied, he thought. He kept twisting himself up, and when Lee was in the delivery room, screaming at him to leave her alone, the nurse had had to eject him forcibly, and even then he stood as close to the door as he could, both palms planted on the door and sliding with sweat. He couldn't stand hearing Lee cry like that; and then suddenly he had heard another cry, an astonishing muddy wail, and this time he had pushed his way back in, and this time no one had stopped him.

He went to Lee first, enveloping her pale hand between his two, stroking back her damp tangle of hair, two shades darker with sweat. She turned her face away from his, but not before he saw a rippling of fear.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he turned. “Don't you want to say hello to your daughter?” Anna said. “A daughter?” Jim said. She laughed at him. Tiny sparklers ignited inside him. The air shimmered past. Anna handed him the baby, and he felt her breath, cool as glass against his hand. Astounded, he began to laugh, hiccuping until Anna clapped him on the back. “Hold your breath,” she suggested.

The nurse gently took his daughter from him. Instantly he felt depleted. “They both need their rest now,” the nurse said.

“I can't rest,” Jim said.

“Jesus, new dads,” Anna said.

He floated from the hospital, giddy with excitement. It took him almost twenty minutes to make a five-minute drive to his calculus exam because he kept meandering on the road in reverie.

By the time he got to the examination room, it was practically full. There were fifty people, and not one of them had he ever had the time to become friends with. He took a seat at the back and looked around the room at all the somber faces, the sloped shoulders, the lank despair that came from too much coffee and too little studying. He leaned across the aisle to the girl sitting next to him. She had black hair tied back with a velvet cord. Her jeans were spattered with blue paint, and even though it was ninety degrees that day, she was wearing a velvet jacket. He recognized her, but he had no idea what her name was.

“Guess what?” he said so enthusiastically that she glanced over at him, her eyes hooded with suspicion.

“I'm a dad,” he announced, preening.

She lifted up glassy blue eyes to his, “Well,” she said finally. “I'm dead, too,” she said. “All I can do is pray I can somehow fake it.” Frowning, she turned from him.

Jim hummed to himself. He felt invincible, like Superman. Wife and daughter. Baby girl. And then the proctor appeared, and he thought more calmly: calculus.

The exam didn't worry him. His best subject had always been math. His father had seen to that. When Jim had been a toddler, falling out of his striped shirts and bright shorts, his shoelaces always hanging over his shoes, Jack had taught him his sums with an old wooden cash register he kept on an extra table in the house. Every month Jack stocked it with fifty dollars of different denominations, with shiny new coins it would give Jim a shock of pleasure to touch. Jack propped Jim up on the Yellow Pages and let him work the stubby keys with his baby fingers. Sometimes, when the keys stuck, Jack pressed down on Jim's fingers with his own. When it hurt, Jim said nothing. “Okay now,” Jack said, pulling out a ten. “I just bought a dozen apples. Green Granny Smiths, at twenty cents a pound. Let's say I have a pound and a half, I give you this ten. Make me some change,” He waited patiently while Jim stitched up his brow and figured the math in his head, ringing it up tentatively, “Atta boy,” his father said, “Now make me some change.” Jim pulled out bills and change, settling it into his father's palm. “That's the way to do it,” Jack said, “Put it in dollars and sense and anyone can be a math wiz.” Jim loved numbers; he loved the look of money: rusted-looking pennies and bright hard dimes falling across his open, willing palms like buckshot. He loved making towers of dimes and quarters, He spent hours fashioning big-winged origami birds out of new dollar bills until his father walloped him one. “That's not appreciating the value of money,” he said. But Jim knew the value. And with a new baby he'd have to know it even more.

The proctor, tall and thin and expressionless, slid a blue book down on Jim's desk. A white edge of exam paper showed. “Begin,” the proctor said, and Jim opened the book, glancing at the formulas. Piece of cake. The girl next to him sighed heavily.

He scribbled formulas; he thought about Lee. His parents would embrace her now that they had a granddaughter; they'd maybe embrace him a little more, as well, Jack had never quite forgiven him for running off with Lee, for giving up the family business, The day Lee had turned eighteen, Jim had called his parents, but his father's anxious voice had cooled and hardened when he found out why Jim had disappeared, why he had taken it upon himself to stay silent. “Protecting that girl was hurting us,” he said. “Or didn't you see it that way?” Gladys had simply cried, and neither one of them had asked to speak to Lee or referred to her as anything but “that girl.” He had told them about his classes, about his scholarship, and his mother had said, “Imagine that,” and Jack had told him the supermarket would always be waiting for him, that as far as he was concerned, it was still a father-and-son business, even if Jim had to wait until he was forty to admit it. Jim invited them for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, but neither one would come, although Gladys had sent him a present, a hand-knit red sweater tied in a blue ribbon, and nothing at all for Lee. Lee had cried a little, even after she saw all the presents Jim had bought for her, and the next cold morning she had carefully pulled on his mother's hand-knit sweater and worn it. “It looks pretty on you,” he had said.