Into Thin Air (17 page)

For a while it was fine to have his parents in the house. He liked the company, the connection, and his parents took control of the baby. They gave her the loving attention he somehow couldn't, and the baby seemed dazzled. She kept looking around until she caught sight of Gladys or Jack, and then her whole body seemed to relax. She seemed always to be waiting to be pampered, And pampered she was. Every night Gladys would take a bath with the baby, balancing her in her lap. Through the bathroom door Jim would hear his mother singing, the same lullabies she had sung to him. The two of them would emerge, skin flushed with pink, Gladys in a blue flannel robe, the baby swaddled in a fuzzy yellow sleeper. “Bedtime for the ladies,” Gladys said, settling herself onto Lee's rocker, pressing off the wood floor with one tender toe, lulling the baby before she put her down, “Little Marilyn,” she crooned, “Sweet little Linda.” She looked hopefully at Jim. “Little Amy,” she suggested.

Jack, too, was in love with the baby. In the morning Jim would stumble into the kitchen to find his father seated with the baby, giving her greedy suck from his finger. When Jack sang to his granddaughter, he crooned hillbilly tunes about broken hearts and smashed dreams, sung so cheerfully you couldn't help but think these lyric tragedies might turn out all right in the end.

Gladys worried. “What are you going to do come September when you have to go to school? Who'll look after little Andrea?”

“Lee will be back by then,” Jim said.

“Honey,” Gladys said. “Honey, you got to plan as if she won't.”

Gladys began folding and unfolding the baby's things. Tiny T-shirts, diapers. She started to cry. “This poor little motherless lambie,” she said. “Why don't you come home and let us take care of you both.” She flung up her hands. “Look at you. You don't know how to eat properly. You don't know how to dress a baby. You have no idea what's cute.”

“I do too,” Jim said.

“You could transfer and go to school at home. There's not much room, but we can manage,” Jack said. “And when you're through with school, the Top Thrift has a pharmacy.”

“And a pharmacist, too, I bet,” Jim said.

“So I'll fire him when you're done with school,” he said, “So maybe I could use two pharmacists. Something wrong with that?”

“Look, I can't leave,” Jim said, a clip of tensions forming at the bottom of his neck.

“We want you with us,” Gladys said. “That's natural enough.”

They didn't say another thing, either one of them, but he saw how Jack scouted the house, silently fixing the sockets he considered dangerous, shaking his head at the dampness of the cellar, sniffing for dry rot, peering around for termites. Gladys, the baby cradled in her lap, told her stories about the house “back home,” the flower garden she would show the baby how to tend when she was older, the dog she might buy for her, She told her fairy tales about evil mothers who abandoned their babies to wolves so hungry, they might eat swaddling clothes as easily as hamburger, about grandmothers who knitted wings out of magic yarn, It all began to be wearying. Jim felt as if another life were being overlaid over his first and real life with Lee.

His parents refused to talk about Lee at all. The house was inhabited by Lee's photo, her face was in every room, but neither one of them ever commented. Jack, picking up the mail, would sometimes find bills addressed for Lee and stuff them in his back pocket. Jim would find them in the trash, crumpled, unopened, and he'd take them upstairs to his room. He paid her bills. He acted as if it were important to keep up her good credit rating. Gladys, watching, shook her head. “Baby,” she said, but stubbornly he kept writing. She brushed fingers along his fingers. “Well,” she said, “you do what you like.” His anger uncoiled.

He turned toward her, furious, “She's my
wife
,” he said. “What exactly is it that you think I
like
to do concerning this? You think she left and that's it, let's just get on with it?”

Gladys studied him for a moment. “I talked to the police, too, you know. They called me. And they told me there was no sign that anyone made her leave the hospital but herself. She left her baby,” she said. “She left you.”

“How do you know what happened?” Jim said. “Were you there? What do you know about the reasons?”

“What do you know?” Gladys said quietly.

Jim folded inward. “She
married
me, didn't she?” he said. “She stayed. And she
had
the baby. You think someone so anxious to leave does that? Maybe she was in trouble and couldn't tell me. Maybe she was forced to leave.”

“I never knew anything about that girl,” Gladys said, “All I know is now you're unhappy. And don't you think that there's something else here that matters to me, because there isn't.” She patted his hand.

His parents might refuse to acknowledge Lee, but she didn't seem to need them to live. She managed to crackle and glint in even the most ordinary events. He couldn't pour the milk for his cereal without seeing her in the shadows of the kitchen. His parents were blind. They ignored the newspaper reports he cut out. They answered his phone as if it were their own, but if the caller had some lead about Lee in California, Gladys's voice would scissor shut. “For you,” she said, and then she would walk carefully out of the room. Lee was dead to her, dead to his father. Jim, kissing his daughter good night, fanned his wife's memory. “Good night from Mommy,” he whispered.

His parents, too, suddenly began to make him worry more about Lee. He didn't dare go out to the store by himself and leave his parents alone in the house, because what might happen if Lee suddenly showed up and he wasn't here? Gladys, in righteous fury, would drive her away. Jack might lecture her so bitterly, Lee would just leave. They'd bombard her with so many questions, she might think he had hardened toward her as well, and then she couldn't help but flee again. He couldn't risk leaving them alone, but he didn't want them to think he couldn't trust them. Falsely jovial, he suggested outings. “I bet you'd love to see the school,” he said. Tense and tired, Jim drove his parents with him to the library. Irritated, he watched Jack browsing through book after book, when all he wanted to do was go home. Gladys, beaming, even started up a conversation with a young woman in the circulating stacks. “You know my son?” she said cheerfully. Before they left Jack insisted Jim check out two books on fishing for him. “We'll have to come back here,” Jack said.

Jim felt like a baby-sitter who had to keep watch. When they went to bed early, settling into the spare room, Jim prowled restlessly. He was wary of every noise. He couldn't risk their hearing any sound he himself didn't. He force-fed himself coffee, so black and strong it created a jumpy rhythm in his blood. At night he skimmed on the edge of sleep, and when he woke his face was furrowed.

His parents ended up leaving three weeks later. There was an emergency at Top Thrift. Workers were striking; fruit was rotting on the shelves. “Come home with us,” Jack said. “Close up this house for the whole summer. You can always come back here when school starts if that's what you want. I just hate to think of you here alone.”

“I can't,” Jim said. “What if Lee shows up?”

“I'm staying here, then,” Gladys said.

“No, you're not,” Jim said. “Both of you have been here for almost a month.”

“We'll come back, then,” Jack said. “Right this weekend if we can. And I'm mailing you a plane ticket so you and my granddaughter can come home anytime you want.”

Gladys placed both hands on the sides of his face. “This isn't your home,” she informed him. “No one says you can't be happy.” She kissed the baby and then stood back, letting her husband take his turn, Jack was awkward with the baby, but he pulled Jim to him. “I find out you needed anything and you didn't call, there's going to be big trouble.” He stepped back. “We understand each other on this,” he said.

“Sure we do,” Jim said. He watched his parents climbing into the cab, windows rolled down, hands outstretched to grip his, and for the first time he noticed his mother's skin, roughened like a kind of parchment. Stricken, he clutched at her fingers. “I wish you were staying,” he blurted.

“Why, honey,” Gladys said, “I'll come up every weekend until you tell me to stay put at home. We'll call you every single day to make sure you're okay. And you know I want you home.”

He watched them leave, and for a long while he couldn't bring himself to go back inside the house. He sat out on the stoop, rocking the baby, singing something low and tuneless deep in his throat, while behind him the empty house seemed to be alive and moving and dangerously unpredictable.

That night, hours before his own parents would be home, he called Frank. He blurted out three sentences about the baby before Frank cut him off. “What do you want from me?” he said wearily.

“Don't you want to see your granddaughter?”

The wires thickened with silence.

“I want to see Lee,” he said finally.

“Well, she looks like Lee,” Jim said, although there wasn't one thing in the baby that looked anything like his wife.

“Look,” Frank said. “I'd just as soon you didn't call here, you understand? Lee never would have left home if it weren't for you, And every time you call, I remember that.”

“But you have a granddaughter,” Jim said.

“I used to have a daughter.” He was silent for a moment. “I have a whole new life here,” he said. “How long am I supposed to keep it on hold for Lee?” And then he hung up in a thread of static. Jim sat, idly cradling the phone, daydreaming, thinking what a lucky thing that might be, to feel as if you had a life.

That night he wasn't hungry at all, but because of his daughter he felt a responsibility to eat. Having a proper dinner suddenly seemed like the mark of being a good father, He tried to remember Jack cooking dinner for him, but all he could remember was one Sunday breakfast when Gladys was sick in bed with the flu and Jack had burned the eggs so badly that the pan had had to soak for a day and a half before anyone would even think about cleaning it. His father was a man who knew everything there was to know about food except how to cook it.

Jim ferreted through the cupboards. Lee had been a terrible cook, as bad as he himself was. They had gotten by on mixes and canned goods and odd combinations of sandwiches. He hadn't minded. He had thought if might only be a problem when the baby was old enough to bring her friends home for a dinner that wouldn't embarrass her.

He pulled out a package of instant Spanish rice. There were three eggs in the refrigerator, half a package of sweating American cheese, and all the vegetables that Jack had filled the freezer with.

He cooked eggs, spattering them with cheese. He made himself a plate, but when he sat down, to his disappointment, his appetite stayed dulled, He ate anyway and then went upstairs and fed the baby a bottle of formula.

He came back downstairs. He felt suddenly uneasy. If he left the front door open, Lee might come back in. He might wake and persuade her to stay. But then, she might come back for his daughter. He got up and locked every door, every window, And then just as he was about to go upstairs, he thought of Lee, a tentative ghost at the front door, shivering, sick, maybe too disoriented to think to ring the bell or to call. He went back to the front door and unlocked it.

His parents kept their promise, calling every other day, keeping him on the phone so long that by the time he hung up he felt swollen with their concern. His ears hurt. Otherwise he kept to himself. He got used to the constant phone calls. The police had advised him to change his number. They themselves got at least twenty crank calls a day. Crazy people claiming they had seen Lee in heaven. A man claimed he had been kidnapped along with Lee, taken up to an alien spacecraft. He didn't want to change the number, didn't want to shut Lee out if she called, Reporters still called, badgering him for stories he no longer would give. Some of the pulpier presses took the few syllables Jim would give them and make headlines out of it.
LEAVE ME ALONE, CRIES ANGUISHED SUSPECT
. They all thought he did it, cleared by the police or not. He had his own signs posted up all over town. Lee's face staring out from telephone poles, from bus stations. Reward. He never listed any amount because he no longer had much of an amount that he could spare from the money left in the other account, from the loans Jack gave him to live.

People did contact him. “I saw a blonde at the Bestern Diner on Route 3,” a man rasped. “Lee is living next door to me,” a woman told him, People claimed they had seen Lee in a restaurant, Lee trying on red-haired wigs at Macy's, Lee wheeling a bike down a country road. It didn't matter. He kept a notebook of the calls and the callers, and followed every empty lead he could.

One night he picked up the phone to hear a woman's voice. “Jim?” she said, so friendly he thought for a moment he must know her. “You must be a nervous wreck,” she said.

“You could say that,” he said, waiting, trying to match a face with the glittering voice.

“I bet you'd love a home-cooked meal.”

“Maureen?” he said. He glanced out the window, but Maureen's house was dark, the driveway empty.

“I've been told my steak and zucchini is the best in town,” the woman said. “Wouldn't you like that? Some steak? A nice glass of wine?”

“Who is this?” Jim said.

“A good night's sleep,” the woman said. “Clean sheets. A warm, comforting body next to you. Doesn't that sound pretty?”

Jim, stunned, was silent. “Well, you think on it,” the woman said politely. “No offense taken if you're not up for company yet.”

He borrowed money to hire a detective, a man named John Martini, who assured Jim that he would find Lee.