Into Thin Air (25 page)

Lila knew Maureen was in the room before she saw her. There was that murmur of cloth, that strange faint perfume.

“Look what I stole,” Maureen said, holding up a flopping stack of glossy magazines. “I took them from the waiting room downstairs,” she said cheerfully. “No one saw a thing.”

Lila began to watch Maureen. When she arrived it was always alone, never with a husband or a friend or anyone except for Joanna. But she never kissed more than Jim's cheek or held more than the baby on her lap. Lila watched Jim, but she didn't know how to ask him again where his wife was then, or an even more interesting question: Was Maureen his married older girlfriend?

She didn't know whom to ask. Certainly not Jim's doctor, a woman named Addie Phearson, who considered families annoying satellites around her patients and who refused to gossip.

Lila leaned thoughtfully along the front desk. Debby was sorting files. “You think Maureen's his girlfriend?” Lila said. Debby burst out laughing. “She's got a few years on him, don't you think? And anyway, what do you care?” she wanted to know. “I'm just curious, that's all,” Lila said. But it had been a mistake to ask Debby anything. “You like them like that, with their heads like bruised fruits?” Debby said. From then on, when Lila walked toward Jim's room, Debby called out, “So how's Romeo?” Another nurse, leaning along the wall, snorted. “Romeo who?” said Lila.

She pretended she wasn't interested. One morning she even got on the same elevator Maureen did and rode all the way up to the fourth floor with her, and the only conversation they had was about Jim's stitches. It wasn't until Maureen was veering toward Jim's room that Lila suddenly tapped her. “Is Mrs. Archer coming?” she said. Maureen's face tightened. She seemed to be thinking about something. “Oh, I doubt that,” she said slowly, and then turned into Jim's room.

Jim's wife continued not to show, and after the first week even Maureen began coming a little less. Joanna had a cold. She had caught it, and now the two of them were suffering in a cacophony of sneezes and snuffles and hard, tearing coughs. Lila began bringing Jim the magazines Maureen used to. She sat by his bed when she could and tried to talk about everything except how she felt.

He seemed happy to see her. The TV was on, background noise. “Company,” he said. “Just talk to me for a minute. Come on, sit down.”

He held up a copy of a tabloid. “Look, a human skeleton was found on the moon,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Lila said.

“They have dead celebrities in here giving advice,” he told her. “They try to match you up with the right celebrity. Like if you're a musician and you want to know if you should kick out the drummer, they hook you up with Elvis.”

“Elvis was last spotted living on a horse farm in Arkansas,” Lila said. “He's not one to give advice.” She sat down beside him.

She glanced at the TV. Godzilla was stomping on a building, and idly she began to watch. He thought she was being kind, that was all, sitting with him watching some meteor-headed monster chewing snakes and flinging humans like a happy game of pickup sticks into the air. He drifted asleep, and when he woke, startled, there was a buzz of sound. He saw the TV in a haze of sleep. Mothra rose in front of him in the dark, fluttering dusty wings, and then, beside him, he noticed Lila. She was hunched forward, her mouth slightly open, her hair falling into the collar of her uniform. He laughed, and abruptly she straightened, embarrassed. “You love this stuff, don't you,” he said.

“I like being scared.”

He scavenged around the night table for his watch. “You didn't have to stay with me,” he said. “I know how busy it is here.”

She shrugged, laughing. “Well, the thing is,” she said, “my shift was over a half hour ago. I just figured by the time I got home, the movie would be over.” She riffled her hands through her hair. “And you did look semiawake.”

He began to look forward to her visits. He kept telling her stories, nothing substantial, just the barest edges of his life, the things that didn't hurt. He told her about the Top Thrift. He told her about mixing chemicals in his Mr. Science set when he was a kid, and how that's kind of what he was doing now, studying pharmacology. He talked a lot about his daughter. She could recognize her own toes, he said. Wasn't that amazing? She knew the color blue. He asked her a million questions about her life. Where did she live? Did she like nursing? Did she ever feel like just giving it all up and taking off somewhere?

“Where would I go?” Lila said.

“I don't know, anywhere,” Jim said, but Lila just laughed.

He was silent for a moment. His mood seemed to shift. He lowered himself into the thicket of sheets and blankets. He looked at Lila for a moment, so still and miserable it started to make her afraid. “Hey,” she said, and suddenly he looked back at her and smiled.

“You've known Maureen a long time?” she said.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure I have.”

“She's nice.”

“Oh, she's great.”

She looked at her watch. She was off shift in ten minutes. “Is your wife coming to see you?” she said.

He picked up one of the tabloids.

“Is she?” said Lila.

Jim looked up from the newspaper. “Eventually,” he said.

The next morning Maureen was back with Joanna, the two of them with chapped pink noses. Jim looked at Maureen with a smile so pure and dazzled that it hurt Lila to see it.

She felt edgy all that day. She brought him his juice and watched him pour a little into a paper cup and hand it to Maureen. She walked out of the room just as if he were an ordinary patient, a man she could never see again and not care about. All that day she had wanted to check back with Jim, but a boy in 4C threw up all that afternoon from chemotherapy, and by the time she was able to get back to his room. Jim was asleep. She sat by the bed for a while.

She spent one whole afternoon lunch hour at the cosmetics counter of Bloomingdale's trying on different scents, letting the saleswoman talk her into a quarter ounce of a scent called Unforgettable. Anyone would want to look prettier. Anyone would like the scent of lilacs behind their knees, in the shadowy slope of an arm.

A crush. That's what it was. Silly and unsubstantial and totally without reason. Inappropriate, her mother would scorn. Your heart didn't flutter over a man who had a wife, a man who seemed to have a girlfriend. She was just on the rebound, going from one ridiculous man to another.

She knew all about cures. She began spending more time with her other patients, reading the TV listings to Mrs. Ames, the woman with a broken hip, who never once switched on the TV. She massaged the coma patient's legs and spoon-fed lime Jell-O to a man in traction.

Lila got through the days, but at night she became uncomfortable, she couldn't eat. Nights she paced her apartment. The rooms seemed too small to contain her.

Lila was in the emergency room covering for another nurse the morning Jim was released. She was fitting an IV into an asthma patient. “How long do I have to be on this thing?” the patient, a young woman with long frizzy black curls, said impatiently, rationing her words with labored slow wheezes of breath. “I have a right to know. I need to tell my boyfriend. He's out there watching
Mutiny on the Bounty
on the TV in the waiting room, and he hated it the first time he saw it. How long?”

“As long as it takes,” Lila said, irritated. The woman's eyes flashed, and she started to say something when a bout of coughing silenced her. Lila helped her to sit, thinking all the time of Jim leaning on Maureen's arm, shuffling out of bed.

She was relieved in less than two hours. It would have been enough time for her to get to the room and say good-bye, for her to slip her card into his pocket. “If you need a home nurse,” she might say. Instead, though, she leaned along the cool white expanse of wall and imagined Jim being driven home, crowded on the front seat with Maureen and his daughter.

It didn't matter. She began working double shifts; she dated a clerk from the bookstore downtown who brought her hardbacks the way other men brought roses, and after a while, like any fever, her feelings toward Jim began to burn themselves out, dwindling nearly to ash, not igniting again until nearly a year later.

All that year Jim continued to look for Lee, but after the accident he began looking a little less. The car wreck had arced his feelings toward her closer to anger. She had left him. He had almost been killed looking for her. He had a daughter who might have been orphaned, and to his great wonder she was a daughter he was more and more in love with.

It terrified him, the way he could love her. In the morning she toddled into his bed and sang gibberish into his ear. She lifted her arms in small perfect parabolas for him to pluck her up and hold her. She made him pay attention to his life. When he caught her rolling in the dust in the kitchen, webs of it filmed along her corduroy overalls, he mopped her off and then did the floors. When she cried he remembered dinner. He had to sleep because he had to be awake enough in the morning to tend to her. He had to exercise because he had to stay well.

It unnerved him a little, seeing her grow, watching her become less dependent upon him. He watched her struggling to walk away from him, tottering from foot to foot, and, hating himself, he scooped her up and pinned her against his lap. “Stay,” he said the way you might to a recalcitrant dog. He saw danger everywhere. He hated to buy milk because of the pictures of missing children printed on the side panels. He'd buy milk only in clear glass bottles. Every time a car passed the street, he went to look for his daughter. The only person he had ever trusted to baby-sit was Maureen, and even then he had his doubts. Maureen was the one who walked right up to the lost cars that strayed into the neighborhood to ask cheerfully if they needed directions. If she liked the people doing the asking, she might even let them inside her house to use the phone instead of offering to make the calls for them herself, the way you were supposed to. She might end up serving them a slice of homemade coffee cake and a cup of decaf to wash it down. He couldn't help himself from checking up on her. Once, when he was at school, he called to check on her so many times that Maureen, disgustedly trying to make a peach pie, finally just unplugged the phone. “Anything happens, you'll be the first to know,” she promised. He made them both crazy with his imaginings. He wouldn't let Joanna alone for two minutes. Maureen came over one day to talk to him to find Joanna leashed into a bright blue baby harness that was wrapped about Jim's hand. “New pet?” she said acidly, watching the baby struggle. “For heaven's sake, take that thing off. You want to give her a complex?”

“I thought it was a good idea,” he said lamely, but Maureen roughly took it off the baby. “Maybe you should have named her Fido,” she said.

It astonished Jim how much she grew, how much she didn't look like her mother at all. When she turned two the blond hair she had inherited from Lee had turned pale walnut, and her eyes were flat black stones. Of course she didn't look at all like him, either, although he searched for similarities, as if sharing a nose might bind them together. The only hint of Lee was a kind of frightening dreamy quality. “Entering the zone,” he called it when he saw her staring out into space. What did a toddler have to daydream about? How much life was there for her to start reimagining it? He tried to get her active. He took her to parks and zoos, and still he would see her dreaming.

She was in love with stories. She'd sit curled in his lap, her small face intent while he rambled on about Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood. She sat for hours, rocking her dolls, whispering secrets he couldn't hear.

One day Maureen gave her a red toy truck. For the first time that he could remember, Joanna became animated. He was delighted at first, but then, watching her, he became uneasy. She was suddenly playing with furious determination, so intently she didn't notice him crouching down beside her. She furrowed roadways into her sandbox. She zoomed the truck toward a destination. “Where's that road go to?” he asked her. She noticed him. “Everywhere,” she said calmly, and he suddenly imagined Joanna at fourteen, slamming out a rusty door with the same dangerous aplomb her mother had had, taking off in the dirty back of a Greyhound bus, her pockets full of maps.

He began reading child care books, carrying Dr. Spock with him on top of his pharmacology texts. He began to be even more overprotective, warning her of cut glass in the puddles she wanted to jump, of bees in the backyard hedges she was tunneling through. She frowned, worried; she retracted her small hand from the hedge and put it behind her back. “Stay with Daddy,” he said. He saw with satisfaction that his overprotectiveness began to work; it began to make her shy. He saw Maureen one day coaxing Joanna to leap across a furrow in the dirt. “I'll fall,” Joanna said. “You big silly,” said Maureen, urging her with a wiggle of fingers, until Joanna began to cry. Jim strode across the lawn. “Let's go inside,” he soothed. “Jim…” said Maureen, but he ignored the way she was planting her hands on her hips, the way she was shaking her head in disbelief, He led his daughter to the house.

Every week he showed his daughter the photo albums, pointing out Lee to her. “Mama,” he said, repeating it over and over, and after a while Joanna could point and recognize the face she had never seen. He kept taking pictures of his daughter, too, putting them in an album and labeling them, imagining presenting them to Lee. Other times he imagined hiding them from her because she didn't deserve to see pictures.

He hated the way time moved on. He hated the change of seasons he had once loved, hated even listening to the evening news because Lee was no longer on it. He hated it, too, when clothes he had bought when Lee was with him began to fray. He couldn't bear getting rid of them; it seemed almost as though he were getting rid of Lee. He wore the same green sweater he had worn on the Greyhound bus with Lee, the time they had run away to get married. The yarn was bitten through with age, his cotton shirt showed through the holes. Joanna, too, was getting older. He couldn't keep her from having friends, from going to school. She might not always need him.