Into Thin Air (3 page)

She began spending more and more time at the cafes. She was eating a doughnut one day, dressed in a baggy black mini, her legs in red tights, when a man sitting next to her suddenly looked up and grinned. She recognized what was playing in his smile; she knew that invitation, that promise, and she smiled back. “Good doughnut?” he said, scraping his chair closer to hers. He wasn't much older than Jim, but he was in a suit, and there was a smooth brown leather briefcase at his feet, stamped with gold initials. He shared some of her doughnut, they talked for about twenty minutes, but her body wouldn't let her forget she was pregnant. She had to shift on the chair to ease the pressure on her back; and worse, she had to pee. She kept expecting him to leave, but he lingered over his croissant; he flagged the waitress over, tilting his coffee cup for her to refill. Lee started to tremble. If she didn't get up now, she wouldn't make it. “Excuse me for a minute,” she said, trying to be careful how she angled her body as she rose. But she saw his face when he saw her belly pulling against the black fabric of her dress, she saw all the promises folding in. “Look at the time,” he said, but he didn't even glance at his watch. He fluttered two dirty bills onto the table by his full coffee cup. He scraped his chair back. “Nice meeting you,” he said, and then he was gone.

Lee never went back to that coffee shop again. She stopped going to the cafes at all. She paced the house, caged. She looked at herself in the mirror and burst into tears. She looked through magazines the neighborhood girls had lent her, stacked with stories about girls only a little younger than herself going off to school, having plans, dreaming of falling in love. She thought of her mother, so in love with her father that she had believed nothing could damage their marriage, “You know the right one the second you see him,” she used to tell Lee, “You wait. It'll happen to you, too.” Lee had thought there was something wrong with her because she had waited and waited, but she hadn't felt one thing toward anyone. And then Claire got sick and stopped talking about the right one at all.

It ate away at Lee, at the future she was supposed to have. It was then that she began to walk along the highway nights, following the headlights as they sped past her to New York, to California, to places where every day might be a second chance. She thought how easy it would be to just jab a thumb out, to be someplace else. Once, a gray sedan slowed for her, a door opened. She froze, trapped in the yellow glare of the headlights. She didn't know what had happened to her muscles, only that she somehow couldn't move, “You need a ride or don't you?” a voice called, and then Lee was moving, running clumsily toward the open door, For one heady moment Lee thought she could just jump in, she could lean back against the seat and just let the car take her someplace. What would it be like to just drive and drive and not think of anybody or anything else but your own heart beating inside of you? A woman not much older than Lee had stopped and was happily peering out at her. She had on a red velour jogging suit, blond permed hair and big gold earrings, and not one ring on her fingers. The radio was blaring a girl group from the sixties. “So when's it due?” she said, pointing at Lee's belly, and Lee stepped back as if she had been slapped. The baby moved inside of her, and she suddenly felt heavy again, oddly cumbersome. Anywhere she went right now, the baby was going to have to go, too. “I thought you were someone I knew,” Lee said. “I don't need a ride at all.” And then she turned and started the long way back home, keeping her head down, refusing to see the headlights, to let herself be intoxicated for one moment by the steady stream of the cars as they went by.

When she came home, Jim was sprawled in the middle of the living room, surrounded by scraps of paper, his pale face fired with delight. “We can afford it,” he announced, waving a sheet of white at her.

“Afford what?” she said.

“A house. Our own, not just a rental.”

“A house?” she said. She stood there, her clothes still smelling of the highway, her heart still beating restlessly. She suddenly felt it, Jim's dream house—three small overheated rooms cocooned around her, connected to the outside world only by the car Jim was always using, her own legs cemented in place by a baby endlessly wailing for her. “It takes forever to pay off a mortgage,” she said uneasily. “It's not so easy to sell, either. We'll be stuck.”

“So what?” he said. “It'll be our home. We don't want to move around with a baby anyway.” She nodded numbly at Jim. He was chattering happily, telling her about the house they might find, a family cottage, something with bright red cheery shutters. He stood up. “I can't wait for this baby to be born,” he said so vehemently that Lee braced one hand along the wall. “I can't wait to be a
family
.”

“What is it?” Jim said. “You look so strange.”

“Nothing,” she said. “You'll be a great father.” He moved to her, draping both arms over her shoulders, rocking her a little. “And you'll be a great mother,” he said. She felt suddenly dizzy. “No, I won't,” she said.

“Sure you will. Don't you think I worry, too?”

“The baby will love you,” Lee said. “Babies aren't selective.”

“Why, thanks,” he said, grinning. “Thanks a bundle.”

“I don't mean anything,” she said, shaking free. “I'm just tired, that's all.” She couldn't look at him without somehow hating herself. She wandered into the bedroom and lay flat across the bed, wrapping her jacket about her. She kept dreaming about roads and sky and all the cities she had never been to; she thought about women bagging their babies like the week's groceries, leaving them wriggling in brown paper sacks right outside crowded supermarkets, women counting on strangers or the elements or not caring at all. Then she thought about Jim, loving the baby the same way he did her, in a web of false forevers that made her panic to escape, before it all soured, as it always did. She couldn't believe in any kind of forever, but a baby, new enough not to know any better, would. She wondered how long it might take a baby to grow disheartened and give up, how long it might take Jim to hate her for the way her emotions were so dammed up. She thought about Jim alone in his brand-new wonder of a house, carefully cradling a baby in his lap, contentedly whispering some sort of giddy lullaby, and suddenly Lee knew exactly what to do.

She began to see a doctor, to take care, and she marked the days on the calendar until her delivery date. She planned. Jim, walking by, seeing her humming, with a red Magic Marker fisted in her hands, grinned.

She suddenly began slowing down. When she walked now, it was simply around the backyard, one hand trailing among the flowery bushes, disturbing the furred black bees that would angrily circle her fingers. Often as not she would simply lower herself onto a plastic chair and read. If she cooked, she made stews that simmered half the evening,

Lee's daughter, though, would make her rush. The labor started nearly three weeks before the final fiery red X Lee had scribbled into her calendar. Lee's body seemed to be speeding and thrashing ahead of her, careening recklessly toward birth. Mute and cold with fear, she clung to Jim; she let him carry her into a cab because he was too nervous to drive, and as soon as she saw the hospital, she began to weep.

She remembered now, the delivery room, stark and clammy with blue light. She remembered how the woman in the next room had screamed. “Larry,” she wailed. “Oh, please, Larry.” Her voice slid up a decibel. Lee shifted in her bed, her hands knotted on her belly. She had cried names once, making love in one of the empty houses her father's firm renovated. She remembered the first time she'd made love, with a boy named Tony, a vocational student in love with small engines and not with her, and although going to the house had been her idea, she had stalled at sex. “What's a little penis between friends?” he had joked, giving his an affectionate pat. “Look, it's not like having a baby,” he had persisted. But sex had hurt the first time. She remembered bellying against the wood floor, crying his name like a supplicant. And giving birth was unimaginable.

Fiercely she willed the pain away. She panted the way she had read from Jim's books, but all it did was leave her light-headed. She was glazed with sweat, turning into molten liquid, Panicked, she started to get up from bed when Jim came into the room. As soon as he saw her, his smile wavered. She sprang, grabbing his hand. “Don't let this happen,” she begged him.

The pain had seemed to breed upon itself. Her mind skittered; she remembered a horror movie she had seen with someone, a woman giving birth to a pulsating yellow larva that promptly ate her alive. Something was ripping deep within her, something with a raw, jagged edge of teeth, and horrified, she bolted upright. Jim moved closer, his features in zoom focus. “The doctor's here,” he said.

She would not survive. She shouted at Jim, “Get away!” but he tagged her traveling gurney. She hit at him with weakened fists. “Go away!” she cried. “I don't want you!”

In a white delivery room, somewhere above her, her doctor told her, “Now you can push,” but she was hyperventilating, the air swimming past her in a drizzle of light. When she screamed she was sure the pain would stop, the way a nightmare did when sound shattered it. “Push!” a voice ordered, and she bore down.

When the baby was finally born, she burst into tears. “You did just fine,” the doctor said, but Lee stretched one hand under the sheet, and every place she touched no longer felt like her. “There, that wasn't so bad, was it?” the nurse said, taking Lee's limp hand, stroking the skin. “Half an hour from now you won't even remember the pain. And now look what a beautiful little girl!”

Lee heard a thin wail. A nurse started bringing the baby toward her, and, panicked, Lee sharply turned her head away. She forced images into her mind: an orange evening sky in Santa Fe, a deserted California beach. The nurse hesitated. “I'll just put her in the nursery, then,” she said. She saw Jim only for a moment. He bent down toward her. “Joanna. What about Joanna?” he said, “Or Caitlin. Isn't Caitlin pretty?” She had shut her eyes. “Everything will be okay, now,” he had whispered at her insistently, as if it were a secret he didn't want the doctor to hear. “You'll see. We're a family now.” She turned her head toward the wall, to a surface that was clean and white and cool-looking. “She's exhausted,” Jim announced. He traced a finger along her cheek. “You sleep. I'll be back here before you know it.” She heard him walking out of the room, heard the door
whoosh
shut. She didn't want this baby, didn't want Jim or anybody. Every time she looked at him she felt as it time had stopped, and it she didn't leave now, she would be cemented forever into this one moment. She would ruin lives. “I know you,” Jim kept telling her, making it an endearment. “You're my wife.” And yet she could name half a dozen different things he believed about her that were absolutely and completely false. “She needs to get her strength back,” she overheard someone say, a voice far away, blurred, as if it were burbled from under water, “Sleep,” someone said, and obediently Lee sank, eyes rolling with dreams.

The noise of the hospital woke her. Footsteps. The piercing squeak of carts. So many voices that they all seemed to blend into one sound. In the distance she heard a baby crying; she heard a low murmuring lullaby. She edged herself up, pushing back the cool starchy sheets, her heart clamoring in her chest so loudly that she was sure the nurses must hear it. She was stunned at how tired she still felt, how every bone in her seemed filled with water, dangerously soft, but she had to move fast. She looked at the clock on the dresser. Noontime. She glanced at the chart at the foot of her bed. A nurse had checked her pulse just a half hour ago. She wouldn't be back around for another few hours yet. Jim was taking his finals, coming by the hospital around dinnertime, planning to do nothing but stay with her and the baby until it was time to go home. She got up, bracing herself against the bed with one trembling hand. She forced herself into her clothes, grabbing the packet of money and jamming it into her purse. Her hair was long enough to sit on and so wild and blond and curly it was her one identifying trademark. She tied it up with gold-colored clips, stuffed as much of it as she could under the baseball cap, tugging down the brim, and the whole time she kept one eye on the door. You couldn't just walk out of a hospital anytime you pleased, not with lawsuits and malpractice the way it was, but to let anyone know she was leaving would be the same as clearly marking her trail. If a nurse did come in, she'd say she had thought she'd feel better dressed; she'd say that lying in bed in a nightgown made her feel depressed enough to be afraid of what she might do. She left her suitcase, left her clothes and her sneakers, her bed unmade and still warm, She was moving so slowly, her feet seemed leaden, She pushed open her door and walked out into the hall, It was the beginning of visiting hours, the halls were crowded with people in street clothes, with women in frilly pastel robes and in embroidered pajamas, shuffling in fuzzy slippers. There were nurses striding past, their crepe soles whispering against the linoleum. No one seemed to even notice her. At the front desk, by the elevator, a woman was arguing with a nurse, “Well, I disagree entirely,” the woman said. “And frankly, I don't care where you got your training,” Lee edged toward the elevators. Lee, she thought she heard, Lee, called to her like a siren song, echoing after her, Lee. She kept her head down; she willed herself to ignore the pull of the cry. If anyone noticed her now, she would say she was going for a walk, that the doctor had told her it was best to get up and moving as soon as possible. She would say she had had a nightmare about the baby, that she was going to the nursery to check to make sure it was still alive. It, As sexless as a ghost; nameless and without substance.