Into Thin Air (30 page)

Joanna was seven and in the second grade, and so bright her teacher was suggesting she be skipped ahead a grade. She had been excited about that. She and Denny had been plotting ways for Denny to be skipped as well, but now Jim's sadness made her wary. She wouldn't go near him but stared dreamily out the window or searched out Lila. He finally told her, sitting out back under the willow. “How did she die?” Joanna asked him, her face grave.

“I don't know,” he said.

She stood up, brushing off a caterpillar. Her hair was even longer than Lee's had ever been, her clothing as helplessly disarrayed. Sometimes, despite himself, he thought he was reraising Lee. He told himself he might be giving his daughter the things Lee had missed, the things that might make Joanna stay. “Do you think it was fire?” Joanna asked suddenly. He had caught her with matches that morning, trying to toast marshmallow puffs.

“No,” he said. “I don't think so.”

He waited for her to ask more questions. She frowned. “But Lila's going to stay, isn't she?” she said, and then he knew she'd be all right.

“I'm going to marry Lila,” he told her. “She'll live with us forever.”

Lila never once asked him what was wrong. Instead she put new blue pansies on the supper table. She daubed vanilla scent behind her ears because she knew it amused Jim that she was the only woman he knew who would choose to smell like a bakery. At night she spooned her body against his and soothed the tight muscles in his back with her fingers. She took her time, and then gradually Lee receded as she herself came to his forefront. And then he felt Lila's presence, immediate and real, rising up before him like a sun.

He told Lila they could move, they could look for a new house. In the interim his house, empty of Lee, became Lila's. He wasn't sure when that had happened. He could drift his hand across the kitchen table and feel Lila.

It was Lila who finally said that as crazy as it sounded, it just didn't matter anymore, that she would just as soon forgo moving as not. “Besides, I like it here,” she said. She liked having Maureen around, and she had even made friends with Maureen's ghostly husband, who had been charmed enough to help her start a small vegetable garden in the backyard. “How could you!” Maureen said to Lila. “Don't you know there are strict quotas on gardeners on this block?” Lila was a good gardener. Already her tomatoes were coming up and green beans and wild raspberries she ate idly from the bushes. There was also a good school for Joanna, Besides, she believed in continuity for children. Even for one as little as Joanna. You couldn't just wrench a child up and expect her to believe in forever after doing a thing like that. And forever was a thing she herself was beginning to believe in.

They were married in September for no other reason than it was Lila's favorite month. “A real wedding,” Jim insisted, remembering the cranky justice of the peace who had married him and Lee. They rented a small white Unitarian church and a rock and roll band. They invited fifty of their friends, and Denny so Joanna would have someone to play with, and all the family they could think of.

Both Joanna and Lila were in bright red dresses. “I wear white all day long,” she said, and instead went shopping with Maureen and came home with a flaming red silk dress. “Red!” Lila's mother cried to Jim. She was newly chummy with him now and insisted that he call her Joyce. “I was hoping you might be able to do something about the way Lila dresses in general,” she said. “Lila sent me a picture of you, and you were in a very nice dark green sweater and a very nice pair of chino pants. I remember that.” She admitted to Jim that she hadn't trusted him at first, not with that Lee business, but everyone deserved a second chance in life, and now her only regret was that Lila's great-aunt Teddy wasn't alive to see her walk down the aisle. “March is more like it,” Jim said. Lila's father insisted he wanted to talk to Jim, but he immediately became so tongue-tied, his wife had to take up the conversation. “He's just excited,” she said. Jim's parents were elated. “I never liked that living in sin business,” his mother said. His father, though, was more practical. “If you had come to me sooner, I could have supplied the food,” he said. “This is my home,” Jim said. “I took care of it.”

So there it was, seven years after Lee had disappeared, Jim, in a tuxedo he had insisted on buying rather than renting, was watching Lila sail down the aisle toward him, suspended on her father's arm. She was in a shimmer of long red silk, her face flushed from her nervous breakfast of three glasses of wine and six supermarket powdered doughnuts. She had about six more steps before she got to him. Her father was whispering something to her, making her nod impatiently, and then she caught Jim's eye, giving him a smile of such pure happy surprise that he bolted toward her, taking her by the hand, pulling her from her father. “In a rush, are we?” Lila's father said, grinning. He laughed. Serenely, deliberately unrushed now, Jim stepped back into his designated place, his hand clasped about Lila's, and for the first time in a long while, he felt completely and absolutely safe.

9

Lee had been in Madison for almost two years, and still she couldn't relax. Every night she made lists of what she had. A place of her own that she liked. A job. A boyfriend. She kept telling herself over and over, I have these things, I have them, but no matter how many times she said that, she still felt that any second she might not.

She couldn't understand how people got through their lives, how they were able to trust. Andy told her every terrible thing he had ever done in an attempt to get her to open up to him. Valerie confided how the week before she had married Roy she had gotten cold feet so badly that she had slept with the dishwasher she had just hired. She looked at Lee, so expectant that Lee finally made up a story about finding out her old boyfriend was secretly in love with her best friend.

“I've got another secret for you,” Valerie said one day. They were both in the kitchen of the restaurant, chopping up greens for salad. “And you're the very first to know it.”

Lee put carrot curls into a wood bowl. She had this terrible feeling that she was going to have to think of something to tell Valerie in return. The odd thing was, she had told so many stories, so many times, that sometimes she couldn't remember anymore what had really happened and what hadn't.

“Roy and I,” said Valerie. “We're adopting a baby.”

Lee put down her paring knife. “A baby?”

Valerie leaned against the sink. “I can't have kids,” she said simply. “We tried everything and, well, when you have a good relationship, kids just seem the way to deepen it, don't they? Anyway, we got this lawyer. We were going to wait for a newborn, and then this little girl popped up. Four years old. Mother died in a motorcycle accident. Lord knows who the father is.”

She dug into her back pocket and pulled out a photo. A little girl in overalls and a plaid shirt stared out at the camera. Her hair was very straight and very black and barely scraped her chin. “Isn't she adorable?” Valerie said. “Her name's Karen. It's been final a long time, but we don't get her for another month.”

“Four years old,” Lee repeated uneasily.

“You like kids?” Valerie said. “You ever want them?”

“Oh, I can't imagine it,” Lee said.

Valerie laughed. “Sure you can. And you'll change your mind. Everyone does.” She gave Lee a sly look. “You'd be a
great
mother. And Andy
loves
babies.”

“It's not for me,” Lee said brusquely. She whisked toward the other room. “I hear customers,” she said.

The “Montana Kid” was what Valerie called the girl. Given to a home when her mother died while drunkenly driving her motorcycle. She had been just twenty. No one knew who the father was. No one could even pinpoint a friend. “The Montana mom,” said Valerie.

Nights, just before closing, when not one single customer except maybe Andy was there, Valerie would sit around the restaurant and swap stories with the waitresses about who they thought the Montana mom had been. “She adored her baby and wouldn't give her up when she got pregnant. She was drunk that day only because she was coming home from a date gone wrong.”

“Wrong,” said Addie, a waitress who had just started that day. “Her name was JoLeen, pronounced the same way as the mustache bleach. And she was drunk because she discovered she was pregnant again.” She yawned. “You know what? All this talk makes me want a baby,” she said. “I'm gonna have to have me a mighty
serious
talk with that boyfriend of mine.”

Lee silently stacked clean glasses.

“The Montana mom couldn't drive by a red light without thinking it meant ‘speed,'” said Andy.

“The Montana mom never ate in good restaurants. She and her kid ate Cheez Doodles all day long,” said Addie.

Lee stretched up to put a row of glasses onto the shelf, She made herself nod and smile, then backed casually into the front room until the voices receded, blurring into a backdrop. She started swabbing down the front tables, upending the chairs back onto the tables. Then she reached for her coat, hugging it about her.

She went back to the doorway and stood there, waiting for Andy to look up and see her, He was excited about becoming an uncle. “Home,” she mouthed.

She didn't want him to say one word about Valerie's adoption, She didn't want to think about babies or abandonment or anything other than how lucky Karen might be to have loving, ready-made parents. She needed him to fuss over her, to soothe her, and when he came toward her she reached for his arm and wrapped it about her shoulders. “Here's my baby,” he said, kissing her. Quietly she gripped the front door and then led him out into the freezing night.

Karen became theirs in the spring. Roy made all the arrangements, paying for a first-class flight for her, making sure a social worker was beside her right up until the second Karen was relinquished at the gate in Madison.

His wife's nerves were all on the surface. The morning they were going to get Karen, she paced the den they had made into a child's room. She fluffed up the yellow duck-printed curtains she had sewn up herself. She took the stuffed animals from the bed to the bureau and then back again. He sloped against the wall, watching her, thinking how very beautiful she was, how all he had to do was reach out one arm and he could touch her. All Valerie could think or talk about was Karen, but all he could think about was Valerie and how this child might change her. He loved his wife. He wouldn't have cared whether they ever had any kids at all—the only reason he consented to adoption at all was that she was desperate to have a child.

“R
elax
,” he soothed her.

She whisked past him to the hall phone. “Where's Andy?” she said, dialing. She had impulsively asked him and Lee along for moral support. Roy had shrugged his okay when she had asked him, but really he wanted Valerie to himself for as long as possible, right up to the moment the child took one of their hands and made them a trio.

Wearily Valerie hung up the phone. “Great,” she said. “They can't come. Lee's sick and Andy doesn't want her to be alone.”

He lowered his head against her shoulder, “Now that's a shame,” he said, and kissed the soft curve of her neck.

Lee had all these excuses why she couldn't go to see the child. She felt fever brewing. She said she had to go to the doctor, that's how bad she felt. She told Andy to send Valerie her best, to tell Valerie she was too woozy to call and she wanted to see the child as soon as she could.

It took her an entire week. She encouraged Andy to come visit her, but she wouldn't let him say one word about the child. As soon as she saw he was about to open his mouth, she would interrupt to ask for some tea, to ask for aspirin or a cool cloth she didn't really need. Sometimes all she had to do was unbutton a few buttons on her shirt, and on his, and then there wasn't room for either one of them to think of one single thing except each other.

She needn't have worried about Andy. His first flush of unclehood didn't last very long. He had been going to visit Karen almost every day, stopping by on his way to court. But things weren't going the way he had planned. She wouldn't come near him, wouldn't touch the toy gavel he had bought for her. She tore angrily around the house. She cried for no reason. Karen seemed either frozen in silence or wild almost every time he visited. She wasn't adjusting, and his sister looked so drained that it began to worry him.

“I don't know about this kid,” he managed to tell Lee. “She's pretty ornery,” He dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Valerie keeps asking when you're coming over.”

Lee pulled on a sweater. She laced up her sneakers.

“We could go Saturday. Spend just an hour and then leave. I can't say I really want to spend more.”

Lee, crouched over her sneakers, was silent for a moment.

“Well?” he said. “Just a few hours? A quick dinner?”

“Sure,” she said finally. “All right.”

They drove up on a Saturday, the blond doll they had bought for Karen cradled in Lee's lap. “You feel okay?” Andy asked Lee. “You don't look so chipper. You want to postpone this?” Lee glanced at her watch. In a few hours it would be nine and they'd be leaving. “I'm fine,” she said.

When they pulled up, Valerie and Roy were racing across the front lawn. Andy punched on the horn, skittering Valerie to a stop. She shaded her eyes, frowning. And then, behind her, was a maelstrom of red and yellow and blue, blurring into shape, freeze-framing into a little girl. She stared at the car, her face expressionless. She was so small and thin that she startled Lee. Pale as white paper, with scrubby black hair and eyes like a piece of hard blue sky. Valerie reached to grab Karen, who pinwheeled across the lawn with a shriek.