Into Thin Air (24 page)

He felt the weight of the box in his pocket. He waited until he was outside and then he carefully peeled away the rose-colored wrapping paper; he opened the box and held up the earrings. Carefully, tenderly, he placed them in his breast pocket, the shirt fabric so worn and thin he could feel the earrings against his skin.

Maureen, if she knew, would forgive him. She loved the baby, and sometimes, too, he thought she loved him a little. He noticed she had started wearing perfume, a dark woodsy kind of scent that reminded him of Mel's garden. She began to pin a shining rhinestone barrette in her tumult of black curls. She never came over with Mel but arrived on his porch nights when Mel was working late or bowling. She found her empty house as disturbing as he did his. She filled up the spaces with sound. Her laugh belled out; she knew jokes that weren't all that funny and bits of neighborhood gossip about people he didn't really know or care about. But it didn't matter. It never failed to cheer him. And Joanna needed people who adored her.

His parents came when they could, but Lee's father stayed distant. Jim hadn't given up. He kept sending Polaroids of the baby. Once he sent a lock of hair, but he never got a response. He imagined Frank sitting on the edge of a bed that might once have been Lee's, holding that frail piece of hair and wondering over it, remembering and yearning. Sometimes, too, he imagined Frank ripping up the photos, burning the hair. Frank never contacted Jim, but he never sent any of the things back, either.

That anniversary, with the air so damp and muggy he could have taken off his shirt and wrung it out, he told Maureen he'd be home later. He was not so drunk anymore. His head had cleared some. She knew him well enough not to question. She said she'd bring the baby to her place, that Joanna could have dinner with her and Jim could pick her up on his way home.

That night, to commemorate his wife's disappearance, he wanted to drive and drive the ropes of highway Lee had loved. He wanted to find her, bedraggled, her face dirty, looking at him with eyes filled with grief and love. He didn't care why she had left anymore. He could blindly forgive everything if she would only let him.

He was only half an hour out of town and certainly not driving that fast. Not fast enough for a ticket, not murderous enough to do damage. He was about to turn onto an exit, circling toward a new route he was sure Lee might be on, when in the car beside him he saw a woman's blond head, tilted back. A gesture, fingers fanned out the way Lee used to. He sped up a little, he swerved to see, and then his car skipped and slammed into the other lane and into a sudden, narrowing black.

Lila Gleason started her nursing workweek the day after Jim had been brought into the hospital. Generally she was pretty. Right now exhaustion and loneliness faded her. Her pale skin looked smudged. Her hair, usually one shiny short sheet of brilliant red, was now diluted to russet.

Lila was slumped in the lounge on a break, swiping a wreath of bangs out of her eyes, when the other nurses began talking about Jim. He was a twenty-year-old man who had been peeled from a burning car crash over on I-91. He had had only a small amount of alcohol in him, and he had a pair of diamond earrings in his pocket and a wedding band. His wallet, loose in the pocket of his jacket, was nearly empty. A lip of it was charred, but still they'd managed to find a card with his home number scribbled across it, with his name. And in the space for the name to call in an emergency, he had printed only WIFE. The hospital kept phoning his home number, sometimes letting it ring nearly fifteen times, but no wife ever answered. No woman ever showed up, flustered in a hasty cotton dress, a run laddering along one stocking, her eyes stumbling.

“Broken ribs. Stitches in his head like they were needlepoint,” one nurse said to Lila. “He's so medicated, it's a wonder he even has energy to breathe.”

“Where the hell is his family?” said Lila. She was tired and cranky and wanted nothing more than coffee enough to jitter some energy into her, and since the new patient's room was right near the one working coffee machine on the floor, she offered to check on him.

She pushed open the door and glanced in. He was sleeping, lying on his back in a confusion of starchy sheets. His eyes were purpled and nearly swollen shut, but even then she could tell how handsome he was and how young. His ribs were bandaged. His head, too, was wrapped in gauze, showing a soft, silky spill of blond hair. She was about to walk past when she heard something, so low and hushed it took her a moment to realize he was crying. She walked in quietly and stood beside the bed. She crouched down toward him.

“You all right?” she said. His face was filmed with sweat; his lids, tearing, still rolled in dreams. “It's all right,” she whispered, lifting his hand to take his pulse, but as soon as she touched him, his fingers circled back and clasped her wrist, so strongly that she flinched. “Please,” he cried. His eyes were still closed; he was still dreaming. She couldn't get a pulse with him gripping her like that. She lifted her hand as gently as she could. His eyelids quivered. His mouth moved in spasm. He reached for Lila's startled fingers. As soon as he grasped her, he seemed to relax.

She lowered the hand he held down against his chest. His heart beat up against her captive palm, and even as her hand was held there, she could feel the beat evening, becoming less rapid. She waited, and then his breathing calmed, his features relaxed; but his grip held. She stood there for another few minutes and then carefully peeled her hand free. He grabbed at air, and then his hand dropped back onto his own chest. “My God,” she said. Her hand was completely asleep, prickling with sudden sparks of circulation. She massaged her palm. She flexed and unflexed her fingers, all the time watching him thoughtfully. When she finally left his room, she left his door open, the way you might do with a child who feared the dark.

All that evening she kept absently rubbing her palm against the bone of her hip, trying to get it back to normal. No matter what she did, she could still feel his heart, impossibly strong, beating up through her skin; she could still feel his hand, twined determinedly in hers.

She was used to people saying all sorts of things in delirium, in drugged, dreamy sleep. People called to the dead. Women sometimes saw Jesus. One young girl, floating on fever, thought Lila was Madame Curie and asked for help on her physics exam the next week. “Please,” he'd said. She walked past his room, checking to see if his wife had finally come, if she were seated in the orange Leatherette chair beside the bed, claiming the hand Lila had held for her. The empty chair began to make her angry. She felt pained for him. Why wasn't his wife with him? She wished she could get her hands on his wallet and find a photo of her. Lila bet she was pretty, with a fringe of black lashes and thick black hair cut into a magazine style. She bet Jim's wife would waltz in here in red shorts and high heels, complaining of the heat, insisting no one had called her. “Please,” he had said.

She went out to the front desk. The night nurse, a middle-aged woman named Debby who had gone into nursing the day her husband had gone to Club Med to find a younger woman, smiled at Lila. “I feel so sorry for ten A,” Lila said.

“He's in bad shape all right,” Debby said. Idly she twined a fuzzy curl of hair about her hand. “I heard the car is worse,” she said.

“I hate it when the families don't show up,” Lila said. “Where do you think his wife is?”

“Who knows,” Debby said, flipping through a sheaf of papers. “Where all the husbands and wives are, I suppose. Maybe she's at a Club Med somewhere with my ex-husband.”

“Don't be silly,” Lila said.

Before she went home she checked on Jim one more time, standing in his doorway, silently watching him toss in the stiff sheets, his face full of storms. It wasn't until the night nurse came by to check on him that Lila realized she had been standing there for almost twenty minutes.

Restless, Lila lay in bed, watching the clock tick toward dawn. She kept thinking about Jim, about the diamond earrings, about his wife.

She knew about love. The nurse in her could categorize all the externals—the wild pulse, the almost audible flushing, the blush like a stain of blood splashed up under the skin. She had had her share of symptoms. She had been in love with a medical student who later took a job in South Dakota. She fell in love once with a hairdresser who had wandered into the hospital looking for a pay phone. His name was Tom, and although they spent an entire year together, every time he caressed her hair Lila thought he was making a comment on the fact that she didn't use cream rinse. “Why do you have to do everything so inappropriately?” Lila's mother asked her when Lila called, crying because her latest lover, Todd, a skating instructor she had met at a party two years ago, had taken a job in a small touring ice show in California and had neither plans to take her with him nor plans to return. “A skater, for heaven's sake,” her mother said. “How can you miss him! You miss doctors and architects, not skating instructors.” But all Lila could think about was how he had scratched her name into the ice with just a bare tip of his blade, how he had spun her around with a snap and twist of his wrists. Todd had left over six months ago, but she still missed him so much that even putting ice in her drinks wounded her. He had teased her over and over because she was a nurse. Nurses were easy, he had told her. But there had never been anything easy about loving him. And there was nothing easy about pain.

As soon as she got to the hospital in the morning, she headed for Jim's room. Astonished, she saw that the bed had been propped up, that he lay slanted upward, blinking dully in the light. He had on pajamas, new blue-and-white-striped ones with the crease still cut into them. His face had some color. “Well, hello,” she said, delighted, and it wasn't until she was halfway in the room that she saw the woman and the baby seated by the far window, and she stopped abruptly. The woman was older than Jim, older than Lila, and was dressed carefully in a sleeveless turquoise dress and blue heels, a rope of pearls about her slender neck, a wedding band ringed about her finger. She was settling the baby beside Jim, who lifted one hand toward the squirming yellow booties.

“Is that yours?” Lila said, walking into the room.

The woman beamed at Lila. “That's Joanna,” she said.

Jim looked up at Lila. “Everything hurts,” he said dully. “You aren't going to make me eat anything, are you?”

“Of course I am,” Lila said. He grinned, and she suddenly thought how interesting his face might look when it was less banged up, when he could really open his eyes. He'd have bruises about them for weeks, she thought. They'd fade, watercolor on parchment. She looked at his hands, relaxed, on the covers. He was wearing a wedding band now. She looked at Maureen's dimpled ears.

She smelled perfume. Something faint and flowery. Tea rose, maybe. Or lilac. Her own skin never smelled of anything stronger than Ivory soap and baby powder. “Ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths pure,” Todd had called her, but she hadn't thought until after he left that maybe he wasn't giving her a compliment.

“Well,” she said. “The nurses were all kind of worried about you.”

“Worried!” Maureen said. “I didn't know where he was! He didn't call me until this morning.”

“Could I get some juice, do you think?” Jim said.

He was cloud-headed. He tentatively touched the bandage on his head. She brought him juice he vaguely sipped at, aspirins he had difficulty swallowing. She didn't want to leave. She adjusted the light; she fiddled with the bed, smoothing the covers, cranking it up until Jim, baffled, lifted his hand for her to stop.

“If you need anything…” Lila's voice trailed away.

“You know, I think this baby could use some milk,” Maureen said, resettling Joanna on her lap. Lila hesitated. “Could you fill her bottle, do you think?” She flexed her body toward a heavy brown leather bag in the corner, then turned back to Jim. “You like the doctor?” she asked him. “You think she's good?”

“Maureen, she's fine,” Jim said.

Lila stooped, dipping her hands into the bag, fumbling over keys and a stash of tissues before she pulled out the bottle.

She brought back heated formula, fitting it into Maureen's willing hands. “Well, you ring if you need anything,” she said.

All that afternoon she sat with a twenty-year-old coma victim. She massaged her arms and legs; she told her hospital gossip. Even though there was a photograph of a young man on the bed stand, Lila was the only person in the room that day.

It was just dinnertime in the hospital. Lila stepped out into halls crowded with visitors and dinner carts and evening medication. She went to get Jim's medication.

When she got to his room Maureen was outside, squinting in at Jim's sleeping form. “I'll come back,” she said. “I could use a cup of coffee anyway.” Lila didn't mention that she was about to wake Jim for his medicine. Instead she nodded, then waited until Maureen was on the elevator before she reentered his room and roused him gently. He looked faintly shocked, resurfacing from sleep.

“Your wife's getting coffee,” she said cheerfully.

He bolted up from the bed, his face bleaching. “Hey!” Lila said, staying him with one grab of her hand. Wincing, he fell back against the bed.

“
Where
?” he said. “Where is she?”

Lila studied him. “Maureen said she'd be right back.”

“Maureen?” he said. He drew himself up against the pillow, stiffening. “Maureen's not my wife.”

“Oh.” Lila rolled the ridged paper cup of pills in her hand. He seemed to be in a kind of trance, moving away from her, and suddenly Lila didn't want to be invisible. She took his hand, peeling apart the fingers and positioning a single blue pill in the center. He frowned down at it and then up at her. “I'll pour you some water,” she said, reaching for the pitcher.