Into Thin Air (6 page)

Frank never minded her reading, She read in the car when he drove her to the dentist; she sometimes brought a book to the table. “She's okay,” he kept telling Claire. “Just let her alone. She'll stop reading as soon as she discovers boys, and then you'll wish she had never stopped.” He was proud of her. He never told Claire it was newly refreshing to be with someone who wasn't always bolting up to sprint three miles or play a fast daring game of tennis even though the temperature was clearing ninety. He introduced Lee to the clients he brought home with him; he sat her on his lap while he talked about window treatments or aluminum siding. “It's educational,” Frank insisted when Claire complained their house was becoming a way station. “Look how much Lee gets to learn about the country.” What Lee learned was how to twang her speech like that of a businessman from Texas. She picked up cost-of-living figures from couples moving on to Oregon or California. She had a collection of train schedules and colored maps she posted to her wall, sticking colored pushpins into the places she thought she might like to visit. He used to take her with him to the empty houses he loved. “Playing house,” he called it, “only we get to do it for real.” The two of them bundled in sweaters against an unheated house, scrambling around dark hallways and overgrown backyards in jeans and sneakers. She clung to his waist through the rough wool of his shirt. His ribs expanded when he laughed. He created personalities for each house they wandered through. An open airy colonial was warm and friendly, like a favorite aunt. A split-level was cool and modem like a fashion model. Only in the houses that were not reparable, the disasters with leaky plumbing and a sweet crumbling odor of dry rot, did his enthusiasm flicker. “Juvenile delinquents,” he muttered. Fidgety, twisting his fingers through his thicket of dark curls, he'd prod Lee to the door.

Frank sided with Janet about Claire's death ruining Lee. But he said things were wrong before that, that they had started to ruin the year Lee turned thirteen, when Claire's voice suddenly changed, It became husky, scraped raw. She blamed it on the poor acoustics of the gym, the way she had to shout to be heard, but Frank was charmed. “What a sexy, sexy voice,” he said. Laughing, Claire started to cough. “Water,” she said. He brought it to her and she tilted back to drink. “I'm fine,” she said, rubbing thoughtfully at her damp mouth.

But the cough took up residence. It nagged at her when she was demonstrating a backflip at the pool so that she lost her timing and struck the surface of the water with an alarming slap. At night she dreamed she was choking. Her ribs seemed to shiver and part inside of her. She bolted awake, her lace nightgown pasted to her back, and crept downstairs for tea. She sat up, clearing her throat, nursing cup after cup of Lipton tea, soupy with honey.

Vicks cough syrup suddenly appeared on the white kitchen counter, bolstered with drugstore remedies. She began missing school, dozing restlessly under a burrow of covers. Right before Frank was due home, she would rouse herself, determined to run. “I'll come with you.” Lee said, setting down her book, pulling her unwieldy hair into a tail, but Claire shook her head. “Not this time, baby,” she said.

Lee and Frank sat out on the front porch waiting for Claire, playing gin with a deck of old cards, the two of them cheating. Lee logged points on a scrap of paper. She was about to get up and make some iced tea when she heard Claire's cough, echoing toward them. In the distance Claire staggered home, her knees buckling beneath her. Her hair was soaked against her skull, her shirt half-mooned with amber rings of sweat, and she couldn't stop coughing. In three steps Frank was off the porch. In another two he had Claire's arm. “You're seeing a doctor,” he said. He found her the top internist in Philadelphia. And two weeks later he found out she was dying, of a cancer so virulent even chemotherapy couldn't help her.

They didn't tell Lee. Claire was the kind of woman who wished on stars, who read her horoscope every morning and half believed in it, She actually thought she might get better. “Miracles happen,” she said to Frank.

Claire told Lee she had a stubborn bronchitis. Lee knew only that Claire coughed a lot, that she was less active. One day she ame home to find Claire energetically frying chicken in the kitchen. The tangy scent of the chicken buoyed Lee, but not half as much as seeing Claire humming over it.

Claire casually pronged a piece of chicken, “I quit my job today,” she said cheerfully. Scraping out a kitchen chair, Lee sat. “You love that job,” she said.

Claire shrugged. “Loved,” she said. “Past tense. The mouths on those girls. Who needs all that lip?” She circled a wooden spoon into a pot, whirlpooling the water. “Anyway, I'm tired of teaching. Always doing the same sports. How many times can you dive into the same stupid pool? I deserve a sabbatical. No one says I can't go back after a while. And for now, I want to spend time with my family.” She bent and kissed Lee's hair. “You and me, we'll go to movies. Think of the times we'll have.”

But the times they had were Claire fitfully sleeping away entire days, waking to sleepily down a glass of water or pee before getting back into bed. Lee, money folded carefully in her pocket for a shopping trip to Macy's, for a promised movie matinee at the Guild, walked past Claire's closed door, slamming her feet down hard, banging and slapping her hands along the wall, trying to rouse her mother. “Let me sleep!” Claire cried, exasperated. “We'll go tomorrow.”

The next day she kept her promise, driving Lee over to the Guild, where a revival of
Casablanca
was playing. They sat in the second row. Lee's sneakered feet sprawled into the aisle; popcorn splintered and cracked into yellow dust beneath her toes. Ingrid Bergman hadn't yet made her appearance when Claire's cough began. Riffling through her purse, she pulled out lemon Life Savers, peeling two of them into her mouth. Her tongue gathered a fine film of sugar, but her throat still felt gritty. “Be right back,” she husked to Lee, and got up to water her laboring lungs with some lemonade. In the ladies' room she sat shivering on the lid of a toilet, her head in her hands, willing the spasms to stop. When she sat back down beside Lee, her face was white. “Let's leave,” Lee whispered to Claire, but Claire was stubborn. She wouldn't leave until her coughing began to incite some of the rowdier members of the audience. Invisible irritable threats were hissed toward them. A boy in a denim jacket stood up and craned his neck for the source of the sound. Eyes lighting on Claire, he scowled and pulled his fist into a pointing finger. “Why don't you make like a tree and leave?” he said. Stung, Claire abruptly retrieved her coat. “We're going,” she told Lee, her face stormy, and they pushed out of the aisle, amid a smattering of applause.

Outside, assaulted by daylight, Lee blinked, trying to focus. Claire forced coat buttons through the holes, misbuttoning, leaving an uneven hem. Her hair looked flat and thin. Her skin was gray in the daylight. Furious, she strode toward the car, Lee keeping pace, “I didn't like that movie anyway,” Lee said.

Claire began sleeping days. Nights, sometimes, she could be talked into taking a walk. She tossed on Frank's old aviator jacket, her hair clipped back with a tortoiseshell comb, her face pale and expectant, “Let's go, tiger,” she said.

Lee stayed home, nibbling on chocolate bars, swigging flattened Cokes. They never were gone very long, usually twenty minutes at most, and as soon as they came back inside, Claire headed for bed. One fall evening, though, when Lee was studying for a Spanish exam, haphazardly conjugating verbs, she heard Claire coming through the door crying, Frank's voice a dull murmur. Lee crept to the front of the stairs, peering down through the darkness, She could see her mother. Claire seemed to be swimming out of her clothing; her sweater bagged over her, her pants ballooned. Coughing, she clung to Frank. “I'm so sorry,” she said.

Even from upstairs Lee could see Frank's face, alive with grief. He lowered her onto the couch, gently pushing a thread of hair back from her buckled brow, and then he settled beside her.

“All those years,” Frank said, “I was so afraid you'd leave me.”

“You're crazy. I'd never have left you,” Claire said.

“You're doing it now,” he said. “Isn't life funny.”

Frank moved closer to her. His hands lay weighted in his lap. “I'll never forgive you for this,” he said. His voice was hard, traveling in the distance. She leaned her head against his shoulder. Lee, terrified, slunk back into her room. She turned on every single light, including the plastic pineapple nightlight she used, and then she reopened her Spanish book and looked at the rivulets of type washing across the page.

Lee had told Jim how Frank had suddenly changed. He couldn't stand Claire's suffering, He retracted like a telescope. When Claire coughed, his shoulders hunched. Every time he looked at her she seemed to be fading from him, so in terror he simply stopped looking. He concentrated on things he could fix, the plumbing he could modernize, the fixtures he could screw in with a twist of just one wrist. And gradually he began going away on the business trips he had always refused to consider.

When he was home, Lee began to catch him with his eyes wet. Furious, he banged dishes in the sink. Fruit-printed juice glasses chipped against stainless-steel pots, Peach stoneware shattered into shards. Claire's discordant cough stayed in the background. Frank switched on the yellow radio to a program called “Melody Makers” and sang along roughly to “Donkey Serenade.” Lee, walking by, caught between Claire's cough and her father's odd song, panicked. She fled to her father, wanting comfort. She clung to the ends of the cheery yellow apron he had tied about him. “Is she dying?” Lee cried. Startled, Frank twisted away from her.

“Don't you have homework to do?” he cried. “Don't you have any friends? What's the matter with you, asking a question like that?” He dashed a soapy hand to his eyes, blinking, and, cowering, Lee ran to her room. She bunched herself up on the bed, knees to her chin. Shivering, she bent down and picked up
The Great
Gatsby. She forced herself to read, thumbing page after page, until gradually something let go, and then she wasn't upstairs in a silent house at all, but swimming long cool strokes in Gatsby's pool.

That winter, it hadn't seemed to stop snowing, Storms raged one after another. The snow sifted into drifts scaling the house, smothering the light from the windows. Lee woke to a droning radio voice announcing the school closings and then swiftly fell back to a sleep thick with dreams. She and Claire cocooned in the house, the heat hissing. That was the winter, too, that Claire suddenly fell in love with Lee's books. “Read to me,” she pleaded, and Lee would, sitting up beside her as the snow thickened into drifts outside. The two of them went through almost everything Fitzgerald had written; Lee read
The Yearling
to her mother, who wept at the end and made Lee reread the last chapter to her. “Always stop before the end of the chapter,” she told Lee. “That way I'll have something to look forward to until tomorrow.” One brilliantly sunny day she came downstairs and found Lee reading on the big white wing chair by the window, a pair of skates at her feet. Lee, guilty at wanting to go out, bolted up. “I was thinking about going skating,” she said.

“Stay here with me,” Claire said. “Read your book.”

Lee stayed with Claire a lot, but Frank seemed always to be leaving. “Don't go, the roads are torturous,” Claire said. “The planes are delayed.” She sat up in bed. “Stay with me,” she said.

“It's business,” he said. “Otherwise I would.” Cheerful, he packed a small leather bag. He was never gone for longer than a few days. He called Claire every night at six, and when he came home he brought presents. Boxes of perfume for Claire, porcelain figurines for Lee, everything from a place called Studley's Gifts in Dallas.

Nights when he was home, he began making late night calls. One night Lee bolted awake from a nightmare. She sprang from bed to turn on her lights. She was almost to the switch when she heard Frank talking, just outside the door. She pushed her door open a bit, letting a sliver of light inside. His back was to her, but his voice was animated. “You know how I feel,” he said, so gently it made Lee shiver. She stepped outside, just behind him.

“Who are you talking to?” Lee said. Abruptly he spun toward her, his face torn. His features recomposed, and he put one hand over the receiver as if she might hear who was on the other end. “Client,” he said. “Long distance.”

She padded to the bathroom. In the mirror her skin looked pasty. Her father's voice blurred from behind the door. What client did you call at midnight? Gently she opened the door. “Oh, God, me too,” her father said, and hung up the phone. Lee, silhouetted in the shadowed hall, watched him descending the stairs to his bed on the couch, but this time, she noticed, he was humming. His fingers tapped an invisible beat against his pajamaed thigh.

The calls stopped. But a month later Lee came home to find her parents shouting at each other, Claire, in her blue cotton robe, balled a letter in her hand, Lee reached for the paper and Claire jerked her whole body back, nearly toppling from her chair, but not before Lee saw a careful blue ink, pink flowers sprigged on an edge. “Dearest heart,” it said. “Go to the store,” Claire told Lee, her voice as tight as a fist. “Take ten dollars out of my purse and get milk at the Top Thrift.”

“We have milk,” Lee said.

“Go,” Frank said.

Lee took Claire's whole purse with her, a soft green leather she slung across her shoulders. She rocketed the four blocks to the market, dashing for the milk, pushing into what seemed the shortest checkout line. Ten items or less, In front of her, a woman wandered one hand through her purse. “I never have what I need,” she said apologetically to Lee. Lee, stony-faced, refused to acknowledge her, The girl at the register had to double-check two prices. She stopped once to wink at a boy who was enthusiastically rapping at her from the window outside. “Some people are in a hurry,” Lee insisted, The girl finished ringing up the woman in front of Lee and then slid Lee's milk into a bag.