Into Thin Air (28 page)

She refused to call him her boyfriend, refused to consider she might be falling in love. Not when he was still looking for Lee. It didn't happen all the time, it didn't even happen all that often, but every once in a while he seemed triggered. He'd get jitters in his legs. He couldn't sit still or concentrate on what she was saying, and instantly she knew he was going to go out looking. He never asked her if she'd come along with him when he looked for Lee. He was smart enough not to. He never even mentioned the times he went out looking, but she always knew. He'd get suddenly preoccupied. He'd remember things she had said she needed to do, things she had to do alone. Or he'd tell her he was just running out for an errand, and would she wait. Usually she wouldn't. She'd make him call Maureen. She wouldn't be an accessory to an event she considered a kind of crime.

Sometimes, when she felt most blue, she dated other men. She let the other nurses fix her up; she accepted invitations from strange men in the hospital cafeteria. But all they had to do was one thing, and she became irritated. This one annoyed her because he hadn't read her favorite book. This one made her harden because he tipped the waiter only eight percent instead of twenty. She once refused a second date with a man simply because she didn't like the way he combed his hair. No one seemed to need her as much as Jim. No one ever looked at her with such astonished delight. He never saw any other woman, but she let him know she saw other men. She left the cards on the flowers she received. She turned up her answering machine so he could hear male voices. When he invited her places, she sometimes said “I can't,” and she saw the way his face tightened. And sometimes, too, when he called her in the morning, she told him in a sleep-drugged voice that she couldn't talk right now. He didn't have the right to tell her not to see anyone but him, so he called her four times that day. And that evening he drove over with a handful of daisies. She always kept herself a little aloof, and sometimes she thought it was that aloofness that drew him to her, as it he thought she were in danger of disappearing, too.

One evening they were supposed to go to a night game of baseball. She wasn't much on sports, but the idea of sitting out under the stars with Jim appealed to her.

He was half an hour late, and when the phone rang she knew instinctively it was him. She tried to plan her first line, but what came out was, “You're late.”

The connection was fizzy with static. She could hardly hear him. “I'm in D.C.,” he said. He was panting so hard, he couldn't get the words out.

“We have a game to go to,” she said, twisting her body toward the phone. Outside, she heard a bluejay.

“Listen, I got this
lead
,” he said. “Someone called me out of the blue. Said there was this new woman that had moved in below him. Really young. Wouldn't talk.” He gave a short laugh. “He wants a reward.”

“Jim,” she said.

“What do you want me to do?” he said quietly.

She went to the game herself. There was Jim's empty seat to her right, but on her left was a man with shaggy blond hair and a black sweater and jeans. He smiled cheerfully when he saw her and gallantly dusted her wooden seat. She let him flirt and buy her popcorn, and when she burst into tears toward the last inning, he turned to her. “Aw, honey, they lose all the time,” he soothed, patting her arm, and she turned toward him and wept on his shoulder.

She couldn't help herself. She didn't answer her phone that day or the next, but she began missing him so much, she finally picked up the phone and called him herself, and all the while her life was spinning out of control.

She began not to depend on plans they might have because he was always breaking them. “Hire a detective, then,” she said, but he told her he didn't trust them, that they were lazy, and anyhow he
had
hired one, and it hadn't done one thing except deplete his savings account.

She tried to keep control. She refused to watch the news with him because he kept trying to find Lee in a crowd scene, because every mysteriously murdered body made him go right to the phone to call the police. She didn't like long drives because he always ended up checking out a lead he had forgotten to tell her about.

She couldn't help herself. She kept asking him questions, but she couldn't bear to hear the answers. They were in the kitchen, peering into the open refrigerator for something to eat. “What would you do if all of a sudden Lee was in the kitchen buttering toast?” she said. Recoiling, Jim stared at her. “What would you do if one morning we were making love, and all of a sudden you opened your eyes and there was Lee in your arms?” She watched the color blanch from his face. He shut the refrigerator door. “Stop,” he said. “Please.”

She couldn't seem to stop herself. The next night, while they were walking to the car after a bad movie, holding hands, Lila blurted, “What if Lee was walking right toward us, right now? What would you do?”

“Don't,” he said roughly. He let go of her hand.

“What would you do if in the movies—”

“I said
don't
,” he said. He stopped walking and faced her angrily. “What do you expect me to say?”

“I think about it all the time,” Lila said miserably. “Don't you? Think about it all the time?”

“I'll drive you home,” he said wearily.

He wanted to know everything about her. Lila would regale him with exaggerated stories about her childhood, making each one more and more outrageous. There was the time she set fire to the doghouse with kitchen matches. The time she was trapped overnight in the dinosaur room at the museum. “More, more, I love it,” he said. She told him every single story she could think of except for the one that had to do with her loving him. She wanted to tell him, to blurt it out like a hiccup, but it always seemed like the wrong moment. She watched him, reconsidering the hungry way he looked at her, the way he listened when she talked. Maybe he was falling in love with her.

The more she saw him, the happier he seemed with her and the more reasons she had not to break it off with him. And to her surprise, one of the reasons began to be Joanna. She had always loved babies. She used to like to walk through the maternity ward on her breaks, admiring the newborns, stopping to talk to the mothers. She herself couldn't have kids. Her first year of college she had been fitted for an IUD that gave her an infection so virulent her ovaries were left scarred. The doctor at the school infirmary had watched how still and serious Lila was and patted her weakly on the shoulder. “Nothing's ever for certain,” he told her, but all Lila kept thinking of was the boy she had fitted herself with an IUD for and how suddenly she didn't even like him much anymore. It was funny how as simple a thing as pain could ruin things.

She got used to loving other people's kids—her friends' babies, the babies on the ward. And although she had expected to love Joanna, she hadn't expected how much.

She liked to take walks with Joanna on the street. Sometimes people told Lila how much Joanna looked like her, which always astonished and pleased her, though it certainly wasn't true. She bought a stethoscope for Joanna, a doctor's toy kit much like the one she herself had had as a little girl. “Listen,” she whispered, sitting Joanna on her lap and positioning the stethoscope in the child's ear. “That's your heart,” she said. They listened to each other's hearts, and once while she was in the kitchen getting a glass of juice, she overheard Joanna telling Jim that his heart sounded funny. “That's because it broke,” he said. Lila poured her juice back into the jar.

She was easier with Joanna than Jim was. When he was with the child, he wouldn't let her let go of his hand. If she went down the slide, he would have to stand right beside it. When Joanna turned four he refused to put her into preschool. He said he intended to keep her out of kindergarten until she was six. “She doesn't have to grow up so fast,” he said.

“For heaven's sake,” Lila said.

Jim might have kept Joanna back physically, but he made up for it intellectually. Every other day he brought home a book for her or a thick yellow pad he helped her make her letters on. She had a toy cash register and all the shiny pennies and dimes he could collect for her, and every time he saw her staring dreamily into space, he dinked the change in his pockets, recapturing her attention. “Money for my honey,” he told her, holding out his jangling handfuls.

Joanna never had one idea of anything she might be missing. She had books and new paints and a shower of coins. She had an adoring father and Lila and one whole album of a blond woman Jim told her was her mother. Some nights she'd romp into the living room and her father would just be sitting by the window, the album open, and when he saw her he'd beckon her over. He'd tell her about the pictures. How this one, of a woman with hair as long and as blond as Rapunzel's in her book, was her mother running off to Philadelphia to marry her daddy. How this woman, with her face all scared and tight, was her mother pregnant with her. Your mother loves you, her father told her. Your mother's far away on business and can't come home yet, he said, she can't even call. Joanna believed him. Every birthday she had a card from her mother, and Jim would hang it on the mantel for her. Lila always got angry, but she wouldn't say why, and anyway it wasn't at Joanna.

Jim kept telling her stories about Lee, and Joanna got Lee mixed up in her mind with the other stories Jim told her, stories about wild ducks and grandmothers who hid from wolves. Lee was as real to her as that. She drew pictures of Little Red Riding Hood, and one afternoon Jim came home to find she had put Lee's picture on her pillow, the covers pulled halfway up over the image. She was tilting a glass of lemonade to Lee's pictured lips. “My mother's tired and thirsty,” Joanna said. “Her job away from us is hard.”

He didn't stop her from sleeping with the picture beside her. He said nothing when she carried on conversations with it. It was only when she lost interest, when he found photos in the backyard rosebushes or on the damp floor of the bathroom, that he would admonish her. “That's not how you treat photographs,” he told her. “They're irreplaceable,” he said. “They're of your mother.”

Joanna didn't feel the loss. And then when she turned five Lila began staying over more and more, and her mother's photograph album was put up in the closet, much too high for her to reach even if she had wanted to.

Lila began to be friends with Maureen. Summers, when she wasn't on her shift, and while Jim was working, the two women would sit outside on balding yellow plastic chaise longues, watching Joanna and talking.

“I like having you here,” Maureen said.

Lila looked up, interested. “You do? Really?”

“Why wouldn't I?” Maureen said. “My husband's fine, Jim's more than fine, but what I need is female companionship.”

“When I first met you, I thought you were Jim's lover,” Lila said.

Maureen laughed, scooping her hair from her face. “There's a lot of strange things going on, but that wasn't one of them, honey.” She stretched out her legs to brown them in the sun, “Why'd you think that?”

“The way you were together, I guess. You seemed like a couple.”

“A couple of nuts,” Maureen said.

“Do you miss Lee?” Lila said abruptly.

Maureen started. “Lee?” she said. “Not that one, I don't.” She glanced over at Joanna, who was reading a book under the trees. She turned back to Lila. “Are you surprised?” she said. “I gave her the benefit of the doubt at first. What with the two of them being so bloody
young
. And then when she got pregnant. I used to hear her crying inside the house, and I felt so terrible I'd go and ring the door under some stupid pretense. Did she want to go shopping with me? Did she want a ride downtown? But she always just got stony-faced. Her face was so dry you'd never know she had cried.” Maureen shrugged. “I always liked Jim,” she said. “I thought liking Lee might just make everything easier.”

“Mo!” cried Joanna. “What's this word!”

“Five years old and reading already! Smart as a whip, that one,” said Maureen.

“Then why does he love her?” Lila said.

“Why does anyone love anyone?” Maureen said, and then lifted herself up to go to Joanna.

Jim told himself that any moment his new life was going to start. He finished school and got a job at Bateman's Pharmacy, just three blocks from the house. It was an old pharmacy, with a fountain and customers who told him how they had known the old pharmacist as a good friend and hoped to do the same with him.

He tried his best to let go. He had work he loved, he had a woman he loved, and still he was unhappy. Finally he went to a psychologist, a Dr. Gardener he had picked out of the Yellow Pages. The doctor wasn't much older than Jim, but he was carefully dressed in a suit. During the first session, Jim had barely settled onto the padded leather chair when the doctor began to talk.

“What you need to do is think of yourself as an alcoholic,” the doctor finally said. “An alcoholic doesn't want to give up alcohol, the same way you don't want to give up your wife. But when he does, he sees he has a new life.” Jim looked blank. “I'm
depressed
,” he said.

The doctor shrugged. “I'm depressed, too,” he admitted. “Do you honestly think that if there were a miracle pill to take for depression, I wouldn't be the first one in line?” He stood up, careful of the crease in his pants. “Get out there and
live
,” the doctor suggested. “That's what I would do.”

By the time the fifty minutes were up, Jim felt as if he were drowning. He had stopped listening to the doctor altogether but instead concentrated on the details of his dress. The doctor had a tiny brass sailboat tie tack. He wore jade cuff links and cashmere socks. When Jim handed him a check, the doctor placed it under a cut-glass paperweight.