Into Thin Air (14 page)

His parents might be able to resist Lee, but how could they resist a baby? His father couldn't. He'd take his granddaughter up and down the aisles of the store, letting her do all the things he couldn't abide for one moment in anyone else's baby, Jim's daughter could tumble boxes into heaps on the floor. Jim's daughter could have expensive Chinese melons and Australian kiwis as balls. And Gladys would be beside herself, knitting sweaters out of cheap bright yarn, baking enough cookies for half the neighborhood.

“Ten minutes,” the proctor announced. Jim wrote a formula. That night they were going to name their daughter. He had all these ideas written down on snatches of paper. Names so beautiful it hurt you just to say them. Deidre. Christine. Annabelle. Lee, he thought. Lee. He thought that that was a name more beautiful than any of them, a name as beautiful as the woman who bore it.

By six-thirty he was back at the hospital. He rounded the corner into Lee's room. The bed was unmade, the white sheets pleated back. Two pillows propped lamely against the headboard. “Sweetie,” he said. He peered into the bathroom, Twin white towels were carefully folded over the rungs, In Lee's closet, her faded blue denim jacket was hung up neatly, buttoned to the throat. Her worn black high-tops lay prone, toe to toe, in the closet.

Maybe she was at the nursery. He had wanted to see her first, alone, before he saw his daughter, but as he got closer to the sound of crying babies, something moved deep inside of him. Lee wasn't at the glass, but another man was, older than Jim, in a navy blazer and red leather tie. Frowning, the man stared at the babies; he lifted up his keys and jiggled them. “Hey, pumpkin head, over here,” he said. When Jim came and stood beside him, he studied Jim for a moment. “So which one's yours?” he said pleasantly, and in baffled wonder, Jim stepped back. He hadn't a clue. He couldn't remember the same baby he had held in his arms. He scanned the cribs, trying to pin down something familiar, an expression, a shape. “That one,” Jim said, pointing to a baby in the corner. “Oh,” the man said. “Very nice.” And when he lumbered off, Jim immediately beckoned to the nurse. “Archer,” he said.

A baby was lifted up. Second row from the glass. The eyes were puckered shut, the mouth barely an underline in the small pale face. Breath caught, Jim trickled fingers at his daughter's closed eyes, her silent face. He still didn't recognize her as anything but a total stranger. He didn't feel any bonding. Maybe he needed to feel her, skin against skin; maybe it was the glass, the hospital environment. Weakly he rapped at the glass. Her daughter stayed motionless, but a baby in front suddenly stiffened and began to wail.

He made his way back to Lee's room, nearly colliding with a candy striper. She blushed hotly when she saw him. She was barely five feet, with shellacked hair shored back with a red plastic headband. He never knew what to make of the candy stripers. They made him feel embarrassed; he always checked his fly when he walked past them. He smoothed his fine, flying hair. He heard them whispering when he walked past.

This one whistled, wheeling in the dinner cart, carefully placing a covered steel dish on Lee's tray. She lifted the cover. “Mmm,” she said. “Cafeteria catburger.” Jim recognized the green string beans, faded from overcooking, the mealy, muggy-smelling potatoes, but he had no idea what the gray paste was in the center of the plate. “What's the matter with that wife of yours, not being here for food so good?” the candy striper said.

“Where is she?” Jim said.

“Don't know,” said the girl, wheeling out the cart.

Jim lifted the cover, poking at one of the potatoes with his index finger, lifting it idly into his mouth. As soon as he tasted the grease and the coarse, grainy coating of salt, he was starving. He scooped up a handful more and chewed. He forked up some of the overcooked beans, which still tasted delicious. The room was so silent. He suddenly felt the way he did when he came home from school to find the house empty, Lee still at work. He felt restless, incomplete, and abruptly he clattered the cover back on Lee's dinner and went to find Lee's doctor.

Anna, when he found her, was leaning against the soft-drink machine, nursing a diet soda. As soon as she saw him, she straightened. “Where's Lee?” Jim said.

“I've been calling you all afternoon,” Anna said.

“Calling me?” Jim said. “Why? Where's Lee?”

Anna blinked at him, “She hasn't been with you, then?” she said. “We thought maybe—”

“Been with me?” Jim said, and inside of him something started to freeze. His stomach hurled. He felt suddenly queasy. “She's not here?” he said. “Where is she, then?”

“We don't know,” Anna said.

Jim heard something buzzing in the background, a sudden harsh whine of an insect. “Call the police.”

“Yes,” Anna said, “We intended to.”

Jim stood in a corner of Lee's hospital room, crowded by the police and hospital officials and nurses and Anna. The detective wasn't much older than Jim, and he dressed better, in a dark European suit and Italian leather shoes. It unnerved Jim, who was in gray sweats and sneakers, his baby-fine hair threading down into his eyes no matter how many times he swiped it back. Lieutenant Blanwell, he said his name was, and even though he must have known Jim's name, he asked him to say it again, and when Jim did, his own name sounded like that of a stranger in his mouth.

Jim stiffly watched the detective fingering Lee's things, touching her clothing, sitting on the edge of the bed, even examining the bathroom floor. The floor was somehow inexplicably damp, and when the detective stood up Jim saw to his satisfaction that the knees of his pants were wet. Annoyed, the detective tried to slap them dry. He rummaged through Lee's drawer, plucking out the cheap lipsticks and moisturizers. He checked the window. Alongside him, men dusted for prints. One picked up Lee's water glass with gloved hands and slipped it into a plastic sack. Another pried himself under the bed and pulled out a long tail of blue terrycloth. “That's from her bathrobe,” Jim said. “The belt.” Blanwell studied it for a moment.

“It's from her bathrobe,” Jim said again, “Sure, I know,” Blanwell said, and nodded at the cop, who put it in a plastic bag. A woman in a rose-flowered bathrobe wandered by, peering in, and the detective shut the door gently. “Well,” he said. “It doesn't look like any struggle.”

Jim leaned along the wall, The air narrowed. He suddenly remembered the plot of every bad movie he had ever sat through. Lunatics roaming through hospital wards, slicing off hands, injecting deadly drugs.

Blanwell sat on the red Leatherette chair by the bed and stared at Jim. “So would you say you had a happy marriage?” he said abruptly.

“Jesus Christ, we just had a
baby
,” Jim said.

“Uh-huh. You have many friends? Who came to visit her beside you?”

“Just me,” Jim said. “She wasn't really close to anyone else. Not like the way she was with me.” He thought of Lee, giggling and gossiping with all the other waitresses, but not one of them ever calling her.

“Did your wife want this child?” Blanwell asked. “You're pretty young, the two of you. You didn't have to get married, did you?”

“Everything was fine,” Jim said.

Lee's nurse crossed her arms. “She had a right to be fresh, in labor like that,” she said.

Jim's shirt was pasted along his back. Sweat prickled and beaded, “Why aren't you asking the hospital about security?” he cried, “Anyone could have come up here.”

“We aren't a police station,” said one of the hospital officials. “We check on everyone who comes in and out of here, we can't tend to a single patient.”

“We dusted for prints,” the detective said. “We'll see what we got.” He looked at Jim. “Anything else you can think of to tell us?”

Jim's mind buckled.

“Well, you said she was happy,” Blanwell said to him, and this time Jim thought of Lee walking the highway, the first time he had seen her there, She had always come home, always come back to him. “Sure,” he said.

“I'm going to need to talk to you more,” Blanwell said. “You go home, get some sleep. Maybe she'll call you. Or maybe someone else will. Or maybe she'll come back here for the baby.”

“I'm taking the baby home,” Jim said, “You think I trust her here?”

“No,” Blanwell said. “You're not. We'll have someone watch her, but until we know a little bit more, everyone is suspect.” He tucked his hands into his pockets. “I'm sorry.”

“You think
I
did something with my wife?” Jim said, astonished.

“You think I think you did?” Blanwell said. He stood up. The Leatherette chair had an indentation where he had sat. “So I'll call you,” he told Jim.

Something had shifted. In cold panic Jim drove back to the house, and the whole time Lee kept slamming up in his mind. She was hidden someplace in the hospital; maybe she had gotten up to take a walk and had ended up fainting in a boiler room no one even thought about anymore. Maybe the hospital had botched something; she was dying on a gurney right now until they could think of a way to cover themselves.

He suddenly thought of this science-fiction magazine Lee had once brought home. Someone had left it at a cafe, and she had picked it up, drawn by the bright lurid cover, an illustration of a blond woman in a torn red dress being sucked into a cavernous black spaceship.
Weird Tales
, it was called, and the date on it was 1952. The pages were stained and crumbling, turning to tissue. The evening she had brought it home, she sat up reading, chewing one thumbnail ragged. There were stories about hauntings and demons and one particular article, reported as fact, about holes in the universe that were responsible for people disappearing. She had read him bits of it. “Scientists say,” she had begun to read, “Which scientists?” he wanted to know, but she waved his words away with her hands, There were tears in the fabric of life, the magazine said, invisible holes and pockets in the ground that simply swallowed people up. Fathers didn't drive off and leave families, children weren't kidnapped. It was simply the fault of a blindly cruel universe. Nobody knew where any of these people went, if they were alive in some parallel universe, or crushed by a sudden new force of gravity, or simply in suspended animation. One scientist swore that when he put his ear to the ground, he could hear whispers, but as soon as he started digging there, the sound stopped.

Now, though, he didn't think it was so funny. He couldn't stop thinking of tears in the universe, of Lee's foot poised and arched like a dancer's, pointing toward oblivion.

The house didn't look the same. He had wanted to buy a place, but he had miscalculated his funds, so they had ended up renting a house instead. “It's just an interim step,” he had told Lee. It was cheap rent, but it was also a house so in need of repairs that Lee had almost refused to live in it at all.

“We can't raise a baby in an apartment,” he insisted. “And we can't afford anything better. Not yet.”

He had fallen in love with the house as soon as he saw it, He didn't mind that there was a large wasp nest in the scrubby front yard or that the first two steps on the porch were rotted through. The damp basement didn't bother him or the slapdash look of the neighborhood, the dirty tricycles rusting on the street, the shouts and calls of children. He loved the idea of a house, especially with Lee in it.

The first rainfall there, they had had to put one of the two pans they owned in the center of the kitchen floor to catch the drops where the roof leaked. The sound kept them awake. The landlord fixed the roof; Jim spent two muggy weeks trying to fix the front steps himself before he realized he was just making it worse. His fingers were full of splinters. He gave up and paid someone else to do it. “Nothing's forever,” he told Lee.

As soon as he opened the door, he heard her. She was rustling in the bedroom, changing her clothing. He smelled her. Vanilla and Scotch pines.

He paced from one room to another, all the time feeling that she was somehow following him, hiding. Frantic, he began rummaging through her drawers, lifting out the silk shirt he had bought her for her birthday, the string of jet beads she never wore. He pulled out pots and pans and found, wedged in the back of the cabinet, some of the baby books he had bought. He began pulling the house apart, flinging her dresses into a jumble on the floor, upending her dressers. The house piled up around him. The one room he didn't touch was the baby's room, pale yellow with an appliqué of butterflies, eye level to an infant in her crib.

It was nearly four when he stopped. He sat in the middle of the living room, trying to sift things into a kind of order, and then he finally stood, rising up from the mess, and lay across the couch, staring out into the night, terrified. He suddenly wanted to call his parents; he wanted someone else in the house with him, but when he dialed the line rang and rang and didn't catch. He hadn't made any other friends close enough to call. He got up, pacing. He didn't realize just how late it was until he saw that all the other houses were dark, closed off. A big yellow tomcat cried fissures of sound into the stillness. He turned on the couch, then got up abruptly and unlocked the front door. He brought the phone by the couch so he'd hear it as soon as it rang. Come home, he thought. Come home.

He stretched out again, and his eyes rolled into restless sleep. He dreamed. Lee was a nurse, dressed in her waitress uniform, her feet laced into white Keds sneakers. Her yellow hair was smoothed under a starchy cap peaked like a turret. She was carrying a silver tray toward him, moving to some kind of silent beat. She smiled secretively at him. Her thin hips swayed. She nodded, locking her gaze to his. And then she dipped down, lengthening her arms into a stretch to present him with the contents of the tray. And then he saw it. A glossy crimson heart, damp with blood, beating helplessly, making a small, terrified clatter against the polished silver tray.