Into Thin Air (23 page)

He took her to his chambers first, showing off the office he himself had painted a soft, reassuring green, his collection of what he called “honeymoon histories.” He had postcards from Bermuda or Virginia Beach, and one from Japan.
HAVING A WONDERFUL TIME
, the cards said.
LOVE BEING MARRIED
. He had photos that couples had sent him of their first children, none of them, to his great disappointment, ever named Andy.

He had her wait outside while he got ready. “It adds a little drama,” he told her. She sat on the bench with the other couples, waiting for him, the only single person there. Most of the brides just wore street clothes, but the girl next to Lee was in a full-length white satin gown, a long white veil drooping over her face. “Would you mind being our witness?” the girl said to Lee. Her breath smelled like Juicy Fruit gum. Lee glanced at the groom, a boy so young he suddenly reminded her of Jim. “Oh, you don't want me,” Lee said. The girl shrugged. She turned to another person, a woman in jeans and cowboy boots, and asked her.

Andy called in the first couple, both probably in their seventies, both in suits and polished shoes. Lee followed them in, standing by the wall, silent. He couldn't understand it, why she looked so tense and uncomfortable, why during the whole ceremony he felt Lee watching only him, ignoring the bride in her pink bow blouse, the groom in his red silk bow tie. As soon as the couple left, he turned to her. “Why weren't you watching the bride and groom?”

“You looked happier than they did,” she finally said.

He didn't understand some things about her. Why she was so stingy with her past, BW, Before Wisconsin, he began to call the time she wouldn't talk about. He didn't understand why he'd sometimes see her brooding and unhappy, and when he asked her why, wanting only to get her smiling again, she told him only that it would pass. She was a secret, and he dealt with secrets all day. All of law had to do with secrets. Defendants lied. Police lied. Even evidence sometimes lied. But he had always thought that part of the mystery and beauty of the law was unraveling it all, finding the truth and trying to set things right. He loved the law, and to his absolute amazement, he was beginning to love Lee.

Lee knew Andy wasn't Bobby, but sometimes she thought he was even more dangerous simply because of how much she liked him. Setting up roots, creating a new life didn't scare her half as much as a relationship. In a relationship people wanted things. They couldn't help but lay claim to your present, and your future, and then, inevitably, the past you had tried to bury.

What would you do if you knew about me? she kept thinking. What kind of price would he think she should pay for a crime like hers? “Everyone lies in the courtroom,” he had once told her angrily, and it had made her uneasy.

She didn't want to feel anything for him. It made her confused, on edge. Every time he brought her flowers, every time he told her calmly that it was perfectly fine that she wanted an evening to herself and didn't call or disturb her or make her feel one bit guilty, it made her angry. She snapped at him as if it were his fault that she cared for him. “You think you know me,” she said contemptuously.

“So tell me what I don't know,” Andy said. They were sitting on her couch, watching an old Bette Davis movie.

Lee was silent. “I want you to go home,” she said.

“What, are we breaking up again?” he said, amused. He didn't start to get angry until Lee brought him his leather jacket, his thick red woolen gloves.

“Just go,” she said. She watched him from her window. He got into his car and drove, and fifteen minutes later she missed him so much, she called him.

Oh, God. Maybe if he wasn't a judge. If he wasn't so in love with the law. Sometimes she would wake at night to find him reading a casebook for the pure pleasure of it. Every time someone on the street said “Good morning, Judge” or “How are you doing, Judge?”—every time a cop or another lawyer stopped to shake Andy's hand, he seemed lit from within.

She came to his courtroom only once, out of a perverse, demanding curiosity. He was draped in a black robe. She could see the top of the bright red tie she had bought him. She sat in the back of his courtroom. She heard only one case. A ten-year-old boy claimed a man had butchered his basketball with a carving knife because his play was so noisy. He carried the ball as evidence, and when he brought it up for Andy to examine, the entire courtroom was tittering except for Andy, who studied the ball seriously.

The law followed him on the street; it came home with him, and it entered the night. She jolted awake once. Andy's side of the bed was empty. The other room was dimly lit. She heard voices. And then she saw a patch of blue, a glint of silver, and a cop came into view, suddenly peering into the dark room at Lee. Lee jumped up and the cop disappeared, but from the other room she could hear him speaking, his voice blurring. She heard Andy. “I don't like to do this,” he said. The footsteps amplified. A door opened and closed. She was fully clothed in sneakers and jeans and her red sweater when Andy came into the room, his face terrible, and as soon as she saw him, she wanted to fling herself against him.

“Cops were here,” he said simply. He blinked at her. “Something wrong?” he said.

“What did they want?” she said. Her heart traveled inside of her, banging against her ribs.

“Commitment papers. I told them to go to a higher court. I'm not signing away a sixteen-year-old girl.”

“Oh,” she said. She felt suddenly weak, boneless beneath her skin. She rested her head against his shoulder. “You know something?” she said. “You have a good heart.” He lifted one hand and stroked her head. “Sometimes I really like second chances,” he said.

“Sometimes I really like you,” said Lee.

“All the times,” he said. He cupped her head in his hands, just long enough for her to feel the warmth, and then he drew his hands back down and left her alone.

She began dreaming about him nights, and in her dreams she told him everything. But sometimes, too, she would dream about Jim, about the nights when he had been sweet to her, about the nights when she had thought she might almost want to be with him.

She'd wake, surprised, shivering. She'd have to get up and walk around her apartment, reminding herself that these were her rooms, this was her life now. A whole year had passed, a whole new life had finally started, and in its context, her old one with Jim had never even existed.

7

The year anniversary of Lee's disappearance from the hospital, the very first birthday of their daughter, Joanna, Jim jolted awake at five in the morning. He surfaced in watery panic, as if he had been drowning with the weight of his dreams. His blue cotton pajamas were drenched; his heart hammered staccato rhythms, and for one wild moment he thought that all he had to do was turn around and Lee would be sleeping in the crescent of blankets at the hip of the bed. He smelled her vanilla scent wafting lazily into the room, riding over the hazy morning light. Resting on an elbow, he listened for her, but the house was silent, and after a while all he could smell was his own feverish sweat, the sour tangle of sheets.

The baby wouldn't be up for another hour. He could go back to sleep if he were a normal person, waking on a normal day. Instead he shifted out of bed with a rough arc of legs. His feet, planted in front of him, looked dirty and untended. Well, he'd tend to Joanna. It would be a good game, wouldn't it, waking his daughter before she could wake him with her impatient wails, his face rising before her like a cold moon.

He was busy enough. Caught in the middle of the summer term at school. Tied up with loans and baby-sitting deals and a work/study job at the library. Ten hours each week checking out other people's books. He had studying to do. He had to drop Joanna off at Maureen's and then pick her up again. She sat for Joanna four days a week, a few hours each day, but she charged him nothing, accepting only the meals he'd cook for her when Mel was out of town. “Hell, the baby's company for me,” she said.

Company. He loved his daughter, but he didn't feel she was company. Rousing himself now, he stumbled into the baby's room and peered down into her crib. “You don't have a clue, do you, Joanna?” he said to his daughter. “Well, you get that from your mother.” He stroked her small back. She struggled to pull herself up, and he picked her up, settling her against his shoulder, where she soggily mouthed his pajama top. He had no classes that day, no work, but he still had no intention of making any sort of celebration out of a day that made him feel like dying. His parents had already sent Joanna a four-foot-high white stuffed panda. Inside the birthday card, his father had tucked a check made out to Jim. “For
our
baby,” he scribbled. He had set the bear in the crib with Joanna; he had called them and managed to thank them profusely without ever once mentioning the occasion.

Tomorrow he'd celebrate. He'd buy her a set of blocks, give her a sugary cake. He'd do the same every July 6 until Lee was back with them.

He dressed her and spooned strained peaches into her, getting abstract splotches of it on his pajama top. And then, after he had showered and dressed himself, at nine o'clock in the morning, he left Joanna with Maureen, telling her he would just be a few hours. She was still in a red gingham robe, her hair matted about her head. She watched him with a frown. “You all right?” she said.

“Sure I am,” he said.

As soon as he got in the car, he felt guilty. He drove immediately toward three different toy stores, and then almost immediately he veered past them. He headed instead to Fuller's Tavern downtown, a place he knew only from passing it every day on his way to school. He parked the car immediately in front and walked into the bar. Fuller's was all shades of brown inside. Deep tan paneled walls, cracking muddy-colored leather booths, brown Formica tabletops. Even the sunlight seemed beige to him here. He was the first and only customer there, and it made him feel somehow defiant. He sat in a dark back booth and ordered three beers. “Bring them all at the same time,” he said. The waiter, pad poised at his hip, brown apron tied tightly about his waist, nodded vaguely. Jim didn't know who he was fooling. He had no tolerance for alcohol at all. The very first time he had ever gotten drunk had been the night he and Lee had gotten arrested, the night he had told her he loved her, the night he had thrown up all over a police station floor. The beer came, three icy glasses that seemed to be breathing mist. He cupped two hands about one glass and swallowed as much as he could. Metallic and uncomfortable. He swigged another portion. He wasn't enjoying this, but his vision gradually dimmed, his head felt happily swimmy. The room splashed before him. He tilted his glass in a toast. “Happy anniversary,” he rasped. He shut his eyes for a moment and thought of her, so hard and deeply he was sure his thoughts might travel, electromagnetic impulses rocketing toward Lee, cornering her in some town he didn't even know the name of, bringing her home.

He drank some more, polishing off one glass, then starting in on another. He still hurt, only now all the pain didn't seem to be happening to him so much as to someone else. He was more of an innocent bystander, a stranger sympathizing with this poor shaggy blond in a none-too-clean summer white shirt, a man who stumbled to his feet, who missed his wife so much that everything that wasn't her seemed to be disappearing. His blood ached. His eyes felt dirty. Fisting bills in one hand, he reeled toward the register.

He paid the bill and then stumbled out into the sharpening heat. Everyone outside looked like Lee. The small pale woman in a pink dress, a baby on one hip. The teenager in pink plaid stretch pants and white plastic flip-flops. Panicked, he looked away. He blinked and walked a little down the street. Lee followed him and approached him, all at once. There she was, whisking into the dry cleaners. Again he spotted her, jamming dimes into the parking meter, wearing a green checkered kerchief about her head. “Lee!” he called, but no one turned around.

There was a jewelry store on the corner, opening for the day, and abruptly Jim went in. Glittering in the cases, like shattered bits of stars, were all the jewels he had never bought Lee. He leaned against a glass case, ignoring the “Please Don't Lean” sign, and painstakingly stared down into a black velvet case of diamond stud earrings.

The clerk, a young woman in a yellow flowered dress, smiled at him gravely, “What can I help you with?” Find my wife, Jim thought, but instead he stubbed a finger against the glass. “Those,” he said. She nodded, looking at him curiously. He stepped back a bit. “It's an anniversary present,” he explained, picking up the smallest pair. “Those, I'll take those.”

“What a wonderful choice,” the clerk told Jim. She leaned toward him happily. The sting of alcohol assaulted her, and she pulled back abruptly. She tried to size him up. “Cash or charge?” she said suspiciously, and when he pulled out a Visa card, she relaxed a little. “You'll make some woman very, very happy,” she said.

“You think?” Jim said. “My wife says all I have to do is bring her wildflowers and she's mine for life.”

“Ah, a romantic girl,” the clerk said. “You're lucky, then. It doesn't take much to please a woman like that.”

She held up the earrings, pivoting them until they caught fiery light. “I'll gift-wrap them for you,” she said.

She fussed with pale pink layers of tissue paper. He borrowed a fountain pen and scratched a message on the white gift card. He couldn't bear to see it, her name on the paper. Lee. To my wife with heart and soul. I love you always, Jim. As soon as he stopped writing, he felt sickened. Beer crashed in spumy waves against the walls of his stomach. He let the card flop on top of the gift box.

“You let me know how she likes those earrings,” the clerk said, touching her own ears, which were ringed with small brass hoops freckled with tarnish.