Into Thin Air (29 page)

Sometimes he felt like a bigamist. He was beginning to love Lila, but his love for Lee was so unresolved. Every time there was a report about Lee, he was off looking. He didn't think about Lila or Joanna or anyone. Not until the moment he found out it wasn't Lee at all, and then they would all come crashing down around him, and he would miss Lila. He would need his daughter.

Lila, furious, would sometimes refuse to see him. She threatened to leave him.

“That's it, I'm moving to Bermuda,” she sputtered once in the fray of an argument.

“Bermuda? Pink roofs and too much sun?”

“There's nothing to keep me here. They need nurses in Bermuda.”

“Don't go,” he said. “You'll fry and blister in the sun.”

“Well, then behave,” she said.

She kept telling him she was going to Bermuda. “Ha, ha, big joke,” he said, but every time she was angry with him, she furiously taped up a ripped magazine page about Bermuda. Or sometimes not Bermuda at all. Any kind of beach scene would do, and once, in a pinch, she had used a newspaper sale ad on swimsuits from Macy's. He could tell when she was less angry, because then she'd take down the clippings, but what worried him was the fact that she never threw them out, just kept them in a shoebox in her closet. “Hoarding ammunition?” he said.

“I just like some of the pictures,” she said.

She had the trip planned out; she knew where she'd stay, how she'd live. She had enough savings. “You'd come back,” he said. “You'd miss Baltimore.”

She gave him a thoughtful look. “I might come back,” she said. “But I wouldn't come back to you.”

He didn't really mean to stand her up. He hadn't even been the one to do the seeking. The detective he had once hired years ago had called him, saying he had word about a woman who might be Lee, just twenty minutes away.

“Guess I wasn't the asshole you thought I was,” he said.

Jim drove all the way over there to look at some blurred photographs of a woman coming out of a grocery store. She had a kerchief tied about her head, and long blond hair, but even in the blurred photo he could tell it wasn't Lee.

“How do you know?” the detective said. “I found out something. This one goes by the initials L.A. She works as a typist in a typing pool.”

“It's not Lee,” he said. He was suddenly exhausted. There were lots of women with strange identities wandering around the planet, endless leads that frayed and tangled and led to nowhere. Lee could be alive or she could be dead, but in any case, for the first time, he had this sudden feeling that she was really gone. He thought of the long drive home. The air in the detective's hotel room was stale with cigarettes, and there was an old Danish crumbling away in an ashtray.

“She has no Social Security number.”

“I don't care. It isn't Lee.” He got up, and when he noticed the clock, he realized he was three hours late for the play he had bought tickets to, and Lila couldn't even go by herself because the tickets were in his breast pocket.

The detective let him use the phone, but Lila wasn't there.

“So?” the detective said.

“I'll be in touch,” Jim said, and let himself out. The whole drive home he thought of Lila waiting for the tickets and him. He kept stopping at rest stops to call her, but the line kept ringing and never seemed to catch.

He went to find her at work the next day. She was wheeling a patient to X-ray, and she nodded at him the way she might acknowledge a total stranger. “Listen,” he said, but she shook her head, cutting him off.

“I waited for three hours. I thought you were dead.”

“I'll get new tickets. We'll go next week.”

“I don't want to see that play anymore.”

She angled the patient toward the elevator. “You followed a lead, didn't you.”

He shrugged.

“I can't do this anymore,” she said suddenly. “I really am leaving. I'm going to Bermuda.”

He smiled at her, relieved.

“No,” she said. “You don't understand. I really am.”

She punched for the elevator. “Think where you'd like to go to dinner this Friday,” he said. Her head dipped down. “I bet the X-rays show gold,” she said to the patient, and then the doors closed silently.

All that week he didn't really see her. She was on the graveyard shift, just when he was getting off, and his lunchtimes were crazy. It was allergy season. He tried to get her on the phone a few times. He left her a message. Friday we'll go camping, he said.

He tried to call her on Thursday and there was no answer. He tried on Friday, and her line rang and rang. He drove to a pay phone and called the hospital, trying to gauge her next shift. She couldn't push him away at work. But when he got through, the head nurse told him Lila had left early. She wasn't coming in again today at all. In fact, she wasn't due back for another two months. “You're joking,” Jim said, hunched into the phone.

“Oh, we never joke about leaves of absence here,” the head nurse said. “We don't have enough nurses to do that.”

“Where's she going?” he said.

“Um,” the nurse said. “What did she tell me? Bermuda. No, wait—California.”

Jim felt suddenly weak. His legs seemed to fill with water. “When did she leave?”

“Listen, I can't keep track of everything. About a half hour ago, I suppose.”

He dropped the receiver and got into his car. Without traffic he could make it to her apartment in half an hour. He wove in and out of traffic. He honked the horn and cursed the drivers, and at one point, rather than be stalled in traffic, he drove along the rim of the road, ignoring the frank stares of the other drivers. The whole drive there all he could think of was that she might come back from California, but she wouldn't come back the same.

When he got to her apartment, he bolted from his running car and stabbed his finger onto her buzzer. He let it ring so loudly that the woman who lived next door to Lila came clomping down the stairs to complain.

He ran outside again and dashed down the block. There was a group of boys bebopping to someone's boom box, trading cigarettes. They were sitting on the stoop, in ragged jeans and sneakers, and if Jim hadn't walked the two extra steps to see past them, he might have missed Lila, struggling to pull a suitcase into her car.

He strode past the boys. “Yo, man,” one of them said, and the music suddenly surged. He lunged for Lila, and as soon as he touched her she whipped around, her white purse flailing to the ground.

“I give up!” Lila cried.

“Don't go,” he panted.

“Why not?” she said. “Why shouldn't I go wherever I bloody well please? You do. What difference does it make where I go? It only matters where
she
is.”

“Lila, I'm sorry. I just—it was stupid, it was just—I just had to see about a lead.”

“It all boils down to the same thing in the end, doesn't it. It doesn't matter where you were, as long as she might have been there.”

She thrashed from him. “I thought you were dead,” she spat. “I even called the police.”

“Lila, listen—” He tried to take her arm, but she jerked from him.

“I'm tired of being second best!” she cried. She began moving back from him. “I'm tired of you!”

“What are you doing? Why didn't you tell me you were planning this?”

“I
did
tell you!” she cried. She made a mighty effort and swung the suitcase into the car. “Lila,” he said. She was already dressed in a summery white cotton dress. Her arms were bare, and she looked so lovely that the air around her seemed brighter. “Don't go,” he pleaded. The music seemed to be getting louder. He turned around.

Lila moved forward, closer to the car. “Lila, I love you,” he cried, and this time, when she turned around, she was crying.

“No. You love Lee.”

“I love you.”

“How do you know that?” she cried. “How do you? It's easy to say you love me when I'm leaving.”

“So stay,” Jim said. “Stay and I'll say it.”

“I have a ticket.”

“I love you.” The boom box suddenly stopped. Jim looked up. The boys were watching the scene with mild interest.

Lila took a step forward, and Jim pulled her back.

“You were out looking for Lee.”

“I was out looking for you.” His face crumpled. “Please,” he said.

“Where are you going to go looking for Lee next time? Paris?”

He was still for a moment. “Lee's gone,” he said finally.

He draped both arms about her, burrowing his face against the long cool line of her shoulder. “I told you she was gone,” he said. “Tell me what you want, so I can do it.”

She slumped, suddenly exhausted. He kept stroking her face, following the line of her shoulders with his hands, but she didn't move. “I'm a fool, and everyone here knows it,” she said, but she stooped to recollect her purse, and then she took his arm and let him lead her home.

She moved in with him that month. She kept suggesting they move to another place, a place that would be a fresh start for both of them, but every time she suggested it Jim seemed to contract. “You're still waiting for her,” Lila said flatly.

She felt she was in Lee's house. Sometimes she could be doing a thing as simple as washing the dinner dishes and the air would suddenly feel warm, as if someone were breathing down her back. “Go away,” she whispered, “you didn't want this,” and continued to wash. At night she flung one arm protectively over Jim. She got up and watched Joanna sleeping, and when Joanna woke and saw her, she would stretch up out of bed for a hug.

She tried to make the house her own. She painted it, pale yellow except for Joanna's room, which Joanna wanted blue. She bought new rugs and shelving and threw out every sheet she thought Lee might have slept on. She rearranged things so Jim stumbled, but he never told her to stop, and she noticed how pleased and stunned he seemed when he saw the painted walls.

It was easier with Joanna. Lila didn't even know what Lee's leaving had done to Joanna when she was a baby. Lila kept trying to make it up to her. She cradled her. She sang her lusty out-of-tune songs. She sometimes lay beside Joanna while she was taking her naps just so she wouldn't feel alone. Lila was there when Joanna had chicken pox, there when she wanted to play tag. She taught the child how to fingerpaint and how to blow bubbles from a paper cone. And she convinced Jim that Joanna was much too bright to be kept back from kindergarten, and she herself would walk her to school and pick her up if he was so worried. She could squire Joanna and one of her friends to the movies, just like any other suburban mother.

When Joanna entered first grade, she was already better educated than all the kids there. She read the whole reader in one afternoon. She could write compositions in a clumsy hand while everyone else was printing awkwardly. When the teacher, an elderly woman named Mrs. Kale, called for a conference, Lila came along with Jim. “You're hindering her by teaching her at home,” she told them sternly. “And you're hindering me.”

“Ha,” said Jim. “Education never hindered anyone.”

Both he and Lila refused to listen to Mrs. Kale. They read with Joanna nights, all three of them on a porch swing Jim had bought from Kmart, and when Joanna fell asleep in their laps, Jim continued to read softly to Lila. “She'll hear the rest by osmosis,” he said. They helped her form her letters. Joanna's best friend, a girl named Denny Wilson, came over every Wednesday afternoon, and when the two girls played school Joanna always insisted Denny be the teacher because it was more fun for her to learn. “Thank you, Mrs. Archer,” Denny always said when Lila drove her home, and Lila never did one single thing to correct her.

Joanna might have been only two when Lila began seeing Jim, but children aren't the easy lovers most people think they are. During her training Lila had treated enough unpacifiable kids, enough angry babies, to know how suspect affection can be. Lila knew only that such attentions had been somehow miraculously earned.

Gradually, gradually, Lee faded. Jim could watch the news at night with Lila and not feel sick every time he saw a blonde. He could hear the doorbell or the phone and not jump in tension. And now, instead of worrying about Lee never coming back, he worried more about Lila's staying. On the street now, it was the flash of red hair, the glimpse of white uniform, that stirred him. And he suddenly knew that living with Lila every day just wasn't enough. He wanted to marry her.

He had planned to propose to Lila at dinner at a fancy restaurant, to have the waiter bring the ring in a clamshell to her, but in the end he couldn't wait the two days for the dinner reservation. Dizzy with excitement, he proposed to Lila in the middle of the night, waking her up from a deep sleep. Groggy, she blinked at him, “Marry me,” he whispered, She blinked again, beaming. “If you think I need to be half-asleep to say yes, you're mistaken,” she told him.

But there were things he had to take care of first, things that had to do with Lee. He was still legally married, legally tied to a past that no longer existed. He hired a lawyer to take care of it, a woman Lila had once nursed through minor surgery. The lawyer told Jim it was a simple thing. Lee could be declared dead; the marriage could be dissolved.

“Dead,” he said.

“Well, the legal death,” she said. “Seven years missing isn't a bad indication, is it? Most alive people make some effort to contact family or friends.”

Jim stiffened.

“I'll handle everything,” the lawyer told him. “I'll file the papers, I'll need to contact her parents,”

“All I want to know is when it's done,” he said.

And when it was, he was surprised at how he grieved, at how suddenly new the loss of her was. A legal technicality and suddenly the house seemed completely empty of her. He could talk to Lee for a thousand hours and he wouldn't once feel a vague contact. He could pick up objects of hers that she had left—a porcelain vase, a cheap brass bell—and not feel one single tremor. He had an attack of loneliness, a melancholy so complete that he suddenly couldn't move past slow motion. He slept through his morning alarm. At work it took him so long to fill a prescription that sometimes people complained. His skin broke out in an adolescent garden of pimples. To his astonishment, the air seemed somehow to have grayed. Everyone seemed to have a pallor.