Into Thin Air (7 page)

By the time Lee sprinted home, Frank was gone. Claire, eyes swollen and hard, was carefully polishing silverware on the table. The floor was littered with pastel balls of Kleenex tissues; the empty tissue box was on its side. She held up a spoon with an intricate floral design. “Who was the letter from?” Lee asked. Claire ignored her, dipping the polishing cloth into solution. “You never knew your grandmother, but these were her pride and joy,” she said. “She gave them to me the day I got married, and I'm going to give them to you.” Lee set the milk in front of Claire, but Claire didn't touch it. She scraped out a chair and took up a cloth. “What's going on?” Lee said. Claire picked up a salad fork, flexing it so it caught the kitchen light. “They're worth money,” Claire said. “Beauty always is.”

“He'll be home,” Lee said abruptly.

Claire surveyed her polishing job for a moment. “Who?” she said.

He was home. He rang the front door in the morning, waking Claire with three big pink boxes of Dunkin' Donuts, six of her favorite honey-dipped crullers. The three of them ate breakfast together, tugging restlessly at the doughnuts, balling up the soft dough in their fingers. Frank lingered at the table long enough to miss what he said was an important showing. “I'd better get a move on,” he said apologetically, wiping soft white doughnut sugar from his lapels. He bent to kiss Claire's rigid neck; he tousled Lee's hair. “I'll see you all later. Don't eat too many doughnuts or you'll spoil our dinner.” He laughed, a nervous hard sputter that was still the first glad sound that entire morning. “Dress for dinner,” he told Claire, who was still in her nightgown, “My two beautiful girls,” Still laughing, he slapped out the back door; but even after the car peeled out of the drive, Claire still didn't move from the table. She sat there for most of the morning, slowly eating the rest of the doughnuts, then making patterns with the crumbs. Lee was afraid to leave her alone at the table, so she sat there, too, until finally Claire got up. That night Claire did dress for dinner, slipping on a blue flowered dress that she tried to belt into fitting her, spotting her cheeks with rosy blush. “Change out of those jeans,” Claire told Lee. “I bet anything he's taking us out tonight.” Lee struggled into a button-back dress. She brushed her hair, and the two of them spritzed on some of Claire's perfume. But although they both waited, Frank didn't come home at all that evening. He waltzed back in the next night, as if nothing were wrong. Claire sat in the living room knitting a bright blue ski scarf for Lee, never once looking up at her husband. “Where were you?” Lee said. Frank looked at the window. “Oh, it was business,” he said, his voice tired. “Something must have been wrong with the phone. I tried calling and calling, and finally I called the operator and she told me there was some problem.” He blinked.

“Yes, it was a terrible night,” Claire said.

After that she just seemed to give up. For the first time Claire started talking about cancer, and as soon as she said it, Lee noticed with a shock how thin her mother was, how her skin had grown so translucent you could see the veins webbed beneath. “There are things you can do,” Lee said.

Lee began buying medical books from the drugstores, In class, while everyone else was diagraming sentences, Lee read about melanomas. At night she dreamed her own cells were flowering like weeds. She came home with alternatives for Claire. A macrobiotic diet of vegetables and rice had cured cancer in California. Laetrile in Mexico. Psychic healers. Lee and a girlfriend went to one of the gypsy storefronts. Lee, twisting her skirt in her hands, told a bored woman in a red turban about Claire. “Can you help?” she said. Exasperated, the woman nodded. “Of course I can help,” she said. Then she told Lee she would make seven white candles from a very special kind of beeswax. Lee would have to light them every night, without fail, and after four days the death curse would be gone. “Poof!” the gypsy said, jointing her hands like wings.

“Seventy dollars.”

Lee, stunned, looked at her friend. “I d-don't have that,” she stammered. “What about your friend?” the gypsy said, glancing at the other girl, who shrank back.

“Neither one of us has it,” Lee said.

“Get it,” the gypsy suggested pleasantly.

Sometimes Claire listened to Lee's odd cures. She'd burst out laughing. “Oh, this does me good,” she said when Lee told her about the gypsy woman. Sometimes, too, she grew quiet. She would draw Lee to her and hold her for a moment, breathing against Lee's hair. But more and more she simply began shutting off when Lee began to speak. She would reach for the remote control for the TV and click it on, drowning Lee out. Anytime there was a sports program on, an interview with an athlete, she switched channels immediately. “Anything can happen,” Lee insisted. “Yes,” Claire said, “and anything usually does.”

She lay in bed, talking back to the soap operas. “How can you be so dense!” she cried. “Tomas slept with Aria!” Lee brought her in trays and magazines and the cards that sometimes still came in from her old students, but the cards seemed to depress her. Gradually she just left them unopened on the tray. Lee read aloud to her, articles and recipes, and sometimes just the TV listings, which Claire loved. “It compresses whole lives in a sentence,” she said. “You know what's going to be the outcome,” Claire leaned across Lee abruptly and reached for the phone. Determinedly, she dialed. “Frank Klantrell,” she said, pausing, wrapping one hand about the phone wire. “Well, when can he be reached, then?… I see…. No. It's not necessary…. No. I said no message.” She thudded the receiver back into its cradle and turned her head toward the window. Outside, snowy hail pelted the grass. Lee held up a glossy photo of a model twirling in a purple cape. “You like this?” she said hopefully.

Claire, distracted, focused on Lee, “I like sleep.”

“I was going to fix chicken for dinner,” Lee said. “Chicken's healthy. It has these special enzymes or something. I read it.”

Claire hooded covers over her head. “You eat.”

“You want me to read to you later?”

Claire, body sloped toward her cave of sheets, stopped her decline with an elbow. “Look at you,” she said. “You're my beautiful girl.”

Lee, who just that day in school had been compared unfavorably to a beaver, shrugged.

“You know what?” Claire said. “I hope you're going to be a real heartbreaker.” She slid under the covers.

Dismissed, Lee went downstairs. She chopped vegetables right on the counter. She was furious with her father for going away, furious with Claire for giving up. Slicing a tomato, she nicked the Formica. She fried the chicken in too much oil and left it in a solidifying bonnet of grease in the pot, her appetite vanished.

She grabbed Frank's aviator jacket, the one that Claire used to wear, and headed for the park in back of the elementary school. It had stopped hailing, but the air snapped around her; her breath was white mist. In the school yard a rusting swing set moved in the wind. Lee sat on one of the swings, the way she had when she was little, when Claire and Frank had both taken her. “Kick toward the stars!” Claire had told her, urging her higher and higher. She said it even on cloudy days, insisting it didn't matter whether you actually saw the stars or not. They were still there, blazing in the firmament, as constant as love. Lee shut her eyes and leaned back on the damp seat. She kicked toward Orion.

Claire would die a month later, the first and only time she had ever been hospitalized in her life. And with her death, Lee's memory slowly began to dissolve. There was no funeral, she believed, no blur of guests in and out of their house, nothing but a dazed kind of emotional hibernation. It was her aunt Teddy who told Lee her life as if it were a story, spinning a beginning, middle, and end: how Lee had been taken out of school, how the two of them had waited for Frank to fly in from Texas. “You couldn't stop crying,” Teddy said. “You couldn't pick up a glass without having it shatter in your hand.” She had finally taken it upon herself to spike Lee's tea with Valium, culled from her own private stash. Lee listened, but she felt this was all a kind of curious story about someone she didn't know, that really, it had nothing at all to do with her.

There were things she remembered: the stiff, knotted way Frank moved in the house, his refusal to sleep anywhere but the downstairs couch, despite the clean sheets spread on the double bed upstairs, the brand-new comforter Teddy had bought to make things less painfully familiar. She remembered too the Salvation Army truck coming to cart away Claire's things. Stunned, she had watched the house emptying of her mother, until she had spotted the silverware Claire had promised her. “Wait!” she cried, scrambling to the truck, clawing at a pile of blouses and books. A man in gray coveralls stepped back, amused. “Go to it, sister,” he said. She pulled out the box. “This stays,” she said. “Whatever you say,” he told her, tipping an imaginary hat. Upstairs, heart beating helplessly, she carefully layered each piece in newspaper and tucked it at the bottom of her closet.

She and Frank were ghosts. Neighbors sometimes came by, balancing cakes or casseroles in two arms, offering invitations to dinners neither one of them ever attended.

She met Frank at the door mornings, She ate silent takeout pizza or Chinese chow mein with him evenings. After dinner Frank would walk. “Be right back,” he told her, but he was often gone for hours, and when he came back his eyes were red and puffy, his face bruised. When they talked it was about Lee's grades or Frank's next business trip or what kind of food to order in. They never mentioned Claire.

“You know,” Frank told Lee one morning, “all I have to do is tie up a few loose ends and then I'm not traveling anymore.” Lee looked up, interested.

She stayed home when he went away, close to the phone, imagining he might call to say hello. Posted on the refrigerator, held in place by a rubber dinosaur magnet, was the number of the Dallas Hilton. She dialed. Eleven at night, his time. “Mr. Klantrell isn't in,” the desk clerk told Lee. “Would you care to leave a message?”

“No, that's okay,” Lee said, but of course it wasn't.

In the spring Frank came home with a small blue package for Lee, a smile spread across his face. “No more trips,” he said.

She peeled away the stiff paper. Inside, a small white box read “Studley's Gift Shop.” She lifted the lid; inside sparkled a small, silvery locket. She dangled it from two fingers, delighted.

“I'm getting remarried,” Frank said. “Her name is Janet Cooper and she's flying in from Dallas tomorrow.”

Gate 707. Ten at night. Lee, dazed, stood away from her father. The whole drive over they had fought, stretching out the same arguments from the night before, He could have told her, She kept asking him questions: Where had he met her? When had they met? How was it possible that he was really in love? He parried her questions. “An eligible bachelor like me,” he finally joked lamely, but Lee was unmoved. “Come on, it's for
us
,” he said.

The plane was delayed ten minutes due to fog. Lee zipped and unzipped her leather jacket. She imagined swollen gray mist swallowing the plane whole, disorienting the pilot into a crash landing.

“Flight 707 now arriving,” an amplified voice sputtered.

Frank, expectant, moved forward. “Ah,” he said, sniffing the air as if it were delicious. People trickled from the gate, heads aloft, eyes drifting from face to face. Frank listed to the left, and then he suddenly sprang forward, pushing past a woman with a baby strapped against her heartbeat, sidestepping a couple and an old man. There, standing perfectly still, her face alive with her smile, was a young woman in a blue silk dress. Her blond hair was cropped close like a boy's, and in each ear she had diamond studs, twin chips of light. Frank blended into her with a kiss so passionate, it startled Lee.

Janet Cooper slowly pulled away from Frank, human honey, and then her blue eyes followed his pointed finger to Lee.

Lee braced herself against the railing, holding on. Janet glided forward, stretching her hands toward Lee, keeping her body at a safe distance. “Call me Janet,” she said politely.

The car waited directly outside the door. Lee crunched up in back with the one piece of luggage Janet had brought, “Here we go,” Frank said.

Janet talked nonstop. She was faintly southern, drawling out her words, keeping one hand tapping lightly on the back of Frank's neck. Her things would be shipped next week; she'd buy what she needed. Life was just starting. “This man,” she said, sighing, turning to Lee. “Let me tell you, he saved my life. There I was working the gift shop in the dead of winter. The heat's on the fritz, I'm wearing three expensive sweaters, one right over the other, and mittens to boot. Not one customer all day.” Affectionately she walked her fingers through Frank's hair. “And in this one troops.”

“Winter?” Lee said. She remembered Claire solemnly watching a snowy hail bombard the window. “God's bullets,” she had pronounced, laughing when the window rattled, “Missed me this time,” she had said. Lee looked at Janet quizzically. “But it's winter now,” Lee said.

“Almost an anniversary.” Janet nodded, “Dear heart,” she said fondly to Frank.

Something began to freeze inside Lee. Pushing through the ice, a memory bloomed.

“You carried stationery at your store?” Lee said. “With flowers?”

“Sure we did,” Janet said. “Best selection in town.”

In the rearview mirror, Frank's eyes avoided Lee's.

“In fact, we carried that heart you're wearing, I told Frank all the girls were wearing them, so it's really a gift from me, too.”

Lee felt herself shutting down. The locket, inside her shirt, weighted her back against the vinyl seat.

“That's some hair you have,” Janet said. “Isn't it hard to take care of? Especially when they really have so many cute cuts these days.”