Into Thin Air (34 page)

Sometimes with her daughter in the car with her, she would stroke Karen's hair and her fingers would snag against something prickly. “Come here,” she said, and groomed Karen's hair, pulling out a burr. “Where did this come from?” she said.

“The sky,” Karen said, reaching for the burr.

“The where?” said Valerie.

“The bonny deep blue sea.” Karen held up the burr, smiling. Where did a child get an expression like “bonny”? Karen was about to position the burr back into her hair when Valerie plucked it free, sailing it out the car window. It bounced on the highway, disappearing under the wheels of a car. “Oh, pooh,” said Karen.

“Don't say ‘pooh,'” Valerie said. Wild, she thought. Her daughter looked like a ragamuffin. The new jersey she bought her was somehow already stretched out of shape. Her sneakers were habitually untied, and her hair was trailing from the red poodle barrette she had thought would look so cute.

Going through Karen's pockets, she found things. She found an earthworm, a butterfly, and once a torn piece of brightly colored map. She squinted at it. Texas. Her daughter was carrying around Texas in her pocket.

“Five years old and already she wants to leave us,” Valerie told Roy, handing him the map scrap.

He tore the paper in his fingers, grinning, “Not without her map, she won't,” he said.

One day Valerie had left Karen in the backyard for two minutes, and when she came back outside Karen was gone. Frantic, she dashed around to the front of the house, calling out for Karen like a madwoman. She sprinted into the road, and then, two blocks away, she saw Karen's small figure walking determinedly. It was easy enough to catch up with her. Panting, Valerie grabbed at Karen's arm. “You scared the dickens out of me!” she cried. “You know you're supposed to stay in the yard. Where were you going?”

“I'm going to Lee's,” said Karen.

“Oh, no, you aren't,” said Valerie. She gripped Karen's hand so hard that Karen yelped. “We're going
home,”
she said. “Home, where you belong.”

She began to keep a closer watch and then, in the fall, Karen started kindergarten. Valerie herself would walk Karen to the school and pick her up, and in between she'd have five blessed hours all to herself. She'd have a silence so rare and bountiful she could wrap it around her like a quilt. Northeast Elementary, Depending on how things went, maybe she'd donate some cakes to the bake sale. Or a dinner for two at the restaurant. That might be nice.

Even though Valerie knew the other kids would probably be in jeans and sneakers, she dressed Karen carefully, in a violet cotton dress with a lace collar. She brushed her black hair and tied a red silk ribbon around it. Her daughter looked beautiful, like the kind of little girl who would play with dolls rather than butcher their Dynel hair with scissors, a girl who accepted hugs as willingly as she might give them.

“I'll pick you up after school,” Valerie said. She was going to the restaurant today, as soon as she dropped Karen off. She was going to lose herself in crab soup and thick sauces and in the comforting cadences of adult speech.

She brought Karen into the class, a large bright room with painted yellow floors. “Look, a hamster,” Valerie said. She pointed to a small clean cage by the window. The hamster was running around and around an exercise circle. “Let's go find the teacher.”

The teacher's name was Mrs. DeCamp, and as soon as she saw Valerie with Karen, she ame over. “I recognize you from your wonderful restaurant,” she said to Valerie. “I had a feast there.” She looked down at Karen. “Well, and who's this?” she said brightly. Karen looked up at Valerie as if Valerie were betraying her. “I'll see you at one,” Valerie told Karen. She wasn't going to make a fool of herself bending for a kiss Karen would only wipe off. “Would you like to see our kinder garden?” Mrs. DeCamp said, pointing to a small row of pots. “Everyone is going to grow their own bean plant.”

“I don't know,” said Karen. Baffled, she turned toward the row of cooking pots. “Like mother like daughter,” the teacher said, and in that moment Valerie left quietly.

All that morning Valerie expected a phone call from the school. When she went to get Karen she expected Mrs. DeCamp to be standing there, hands on her hips, insisting Valerie keep Karen back another year. But Karen bounded out smiling, a crepe-paper flower in one hand. She seemed to like her first day. “Mrs. DeCamp said I could take the hamster home one weekend,” she said. “The whole class gets to.”

“Isn't that nice,” said Valerie.

Every morning Karen willingly set off for school. She almost always had something in her hand when she returned. Clumsy letters on a sheet of blue-lined paper. A crepe-paper flower. Sometimes, though, she brought home drawings that Valerie couldn't bring herself to tack up on the refrigerator because they were always of a woman she didn't know, a woman with short blond hair and a black jacket and high black boots, standing beside a motorcycle.

“Would you like to invite any friends home?” Valerie asked Karen one night at dinner.

Karen shook her head. “Lee,” she said.

Valerie calmly pulled apart a minibaguette. That morning in the restaurant Lee had leaned against the stove and asked a million insistent questions about Karen. Did she like the kids? Was the teacher too strict? She had wanted to invite herself to dinner. She had books for Karen, she said. She had a box of paints. She wanted to come over that night. “Tonight's not good,” Valerie had said.

“Isn't there anyone in your class you like?”

“Amy,” said Karen. “Jane.”

“Well, whenever you want to invite them over you can,” Valerie said. She looked across the table at Roy. He seemed more relaxed. Things could be all right. Karen was already less disruptive at home. Maybe she could make some friends, maybe she could be socialized the way the psychologist had said, transformed into a daughter despite herself.

Karen had been in kindergarten nearly a month when Mrs. DeCamp called. Karen was having tantrums. She couldn't make friends.

“What about Amy?” Valerie said.

“Amy?” said Mrs. DeCamp. “There's no Amy in my classroom.”

“What about Jane?”

“Mrs. Hayes.”

Mrs. DeCamp cleared her throat. She told Valerie Karen kept to herself. She kept drawing these paper dolls with clumsy genitals, drawings Mrs. DeCamp had to confiscate before they confused the other children. Karen hit the other children. She used the words “damn” and “shit.”

“But why I'm really calling,” Mrs. DeCamp said, pausing, “is that Karen keeps walking out of class.”

Valerie felt suddenly dizzy. “She does?” she said. “Where does she go?”

“Don't be silly,” said Mrs. DeCamp. “I catch her before she's halfway onto the playground.”

“I'll take care of it,” Valerie said.

She hadn't the foggiest idea how to take care of such a thing. She didn't want to do one single thing that might make Karen dislike school enough to start balking about going. She had to be discreet.

That night she was leafing through a
Parents
magazine when she came across the answer. Sleep hypnosis. You could tell a drowsy child that he wasn't going to wet the bed anymore and the suggestion would implant as firmly as if a hypnotist had given it. You could make a child think behaving was his own idea and not yours.

Valerie put down the magazine. Karen was already in bed, burrowed sleepily under the soft blue coverlet. Valerie bent toward Karen, “You want to stay in the classroom,” she whispered. Karen's lids fluttered open. She looked at Valerie with real interest, “You stay in school.” Valerie whispered again, stroking Karen's small pulsing lids shut.

The hypnotism didn't work. Valerie got a call from Mrs. DeCamp two days later and then again the following week. Karen kept trying to walk off. Karen had hit another student. Karen had taken her wax carton of milk and poured it into the lap of another student.

The more Valerie tried to tame her, the wilder Karen seemed. At home she hurled her dinner plate to the floor. Her nightmares increased. In desperation Valerie began bringing Karen to Lee's, but even at Lee's Karen seemed worse. When Valerie came to get her, Karen was filthy dirty, zooming around and around in furious circles, and although Lee shrugged it off as play, Valerie was alarmed.

She and Roy went to conference after conference with the teacher, with psychologists, but no one seemed to make any difference. Valerie and Roy kept Karen in at night. They tried rewarding her with toys when she was good; for one week Valerie even gave her baby tranquilizers, which seemed to make Karen edgier. She began to have prickles of doubt about ever having adopted, and although she could never come right out and ask Roy, she wondered if he was sorry they had adopted, if secretly he blamed her for not being able to conceive.

The truth was that Roy didn't blame anyone but himself. He should have insisted they find a baby; he should have convinced Valerie a childless life was still one worth living. He shouldn't have given in to love.

He hated feeling like a bad father, but he couldn't discipline Karen any more than Valerie seemed to be able to. When he was most furious, he made her go to her room. Exhausted, he'd slump in the living room, thinking about when he had first courted Valerie, how the two of them used to go and rent movies, bringing four back to his apartment, but by the end of the evening they hadn't watched a single frame. They hadn't seen a thing but each other.

There was never a single sound from Karen's room. When he went to check on her, she was coloring on her bed or leafing through a picture book Lee had given her, making up her own words to the story. When she saw him, she fiercely turned away.

He couldn't help his frustration. He couldn't help the way his stomach clenched as soon as he approached the house. He began to wake up early just so he could have some silence. He kept out of Karen's way simply because he couldn't bear the way she seemed to stare through him, and he began to get angry about it. What was so terrible about him that a little girl would seem to hate him this way? What was so unappetizing about his hugs? He got into bed and burrowed against Valerie, who was so still and quiet, it bothered him. “You there?” he said, propping himself on one elbow. She was staring into the darkness, listening to Karen kicking her bedroom closet, the thud like a heartbeat through the wall. “Val?” he said. She didn't turn toward him. He floated a hand down her breast and she moved away. “I'm just too knotted up,” she told him.

“You want to talk?” he said.

She shook her head.

“No? Not even to me?” He stroked her stomach lightly.

“Not even to you,” she said. Stricken, he took his hand away.

He lay in bed until almost three, and every time one of the fluorescent numbers clicked ahead into the next, he didn't think, This is a new day. Instead, he thought, Time is running out.

He was gone when Valerie woke up. Uneasy, she hustled Karen off to school and then went to Roy's office.

His secretary told Valerie he hadn't wanted to be disturbed, but she went into his office anyway. He was sleeping on his office couch, his mouth soft and open. She crouched beside him, kissing his cheek. He blinked up at her.

“I missed you this morning,” she said.

“Did you? You don't seem to that much anymore.”

She sat on the edge of the couch. “Yes, I do,” she said.

He lifted himself up, ruffling his hair. And when he turned to her, his face was beaten. “What are we going to do?” he said.

Valerie looked for help where she could find it. She began reading every child care book she could find, but none of them ever seemed to quite apply to Karen. She cornered mothers with kids in the restaurant, but the mothers always seemed vaguely insulted when Valerie asked them if their kids ever had tantrums. The parents at the PTA meetings she and Roy now dutifully attended looked at Valerie with slight hostility. Karen had hit some of their own children. They acted as if Karen's behavior were her fault, as if there were something she should be doing, but no matter how she asked, no one could tell her what that was.

“I'm not to blame,” Valerie cried in the car. Roy kept one arm about her as he drove to pick up Karen from Lee's. “Of course you're not,” he insisted. “Neither of us is.”

Lee was calm and unruffled. In the living room, Karen was curled onto a chair, “Come on, honey,” Valerie said to Karen, but Karen wouldn't move. “Honey,” Valerie said, near tears again. “I want to stay here,” Karen said roughly. She wasn't in the nice clean pajamas Valerie had sent over with her. She had on one of Lee's T-shirts that said “I'd Rather Be Sailing,” and as far as she knew Lee hadn't sailed once in her whole life. It was past ten and she had six chocolate cookies in her lap. Of course a child wouldn't want to leave a home like that. Of course a child would gravitate toward a place like that the first chance she could. She studied Lee as if she had never seen her before. Lee was also wolfing cookies. She was barefoot even though everyone knew there were splinters in wood floors, and on Lee's dusty floor there were also stray glasses, a coffee spoon, and God knew what else. Valerie straightened. She began to think that maybe Lee was the one who was at fault, that maybe Lee wasn't such a good influence on her child, that maybe it had been a mistake to have been so grateful for her sitting.

Valerie determined to switch Karen's alliance. She had expected things to come too naturally; she hadn't tried hard enough. Well, she could be as spontaneous as Lee, as surprising, only she wouldn't be giving her daughter cookies at eleven at night. She wouldn't let her walk in the night.

One evening she hustled Karen into the car. “It's a surprise!” she said. She drove ten miles, past Dairy Queen stands and shopping malls, Karen tense beside her. “Lean back, now,” she told her, gently lowering her against the seat, but as soon as she released her hold, Karen sprang forward again. “Guess where we're going?” she said brightly.