Into Thin Air (33 page)

Lee didn't really know why, but she began to sit for Karen more and more. “You can say no,” Andy said, though the truth of it was he liked it when Lee sat. Evenings after Karen had left, Lee couldn't seem to get enough of him. She trailed him from room to room. All he had to do was move two steps closer to her and she would reach out for a kiss.

Lee watched Karen with increasing confusion. She dreaded having her come over, as much as she felt compelled to see her. Sometimes she thought she brought Karen out into the night just to be back in her own element, just to add distance between the two of them, but then Karen would take the same deep pleasure from the darkness that Lee did, confusing her even further.

Lee kept trying to vary the route. It was Karen who wanted to walk all the way home, who liked standing outside in front of her own house and watching the dimly lighted windows. “Want to call out?” Lee asked. “We could wave at them from out here.”

“No,” said Karen, but she wanted to stand out there a while longer.

Every night, too, eventually, Karen kept piloting them toward the house with the motorcycle. Every time she saw it, she would end up crying, a sound so desperate it made Lee feel undone. Karen never wanted to leave the bike. “Wait,” she said. She kept staring out into the night, her body tensed. Light flickered on from the house. She fluttered her small fingers over the chrome, over the soft leather seat, the smooth red paint. The door opened and Karen lifted her face, expectant. A teenage boy came out, in black pointy-toed boots and a white T-shirt. He was smoking a cigarette, taking deep, angry draws. “Hey, get away from there,” he said. “That's private property.” Lee straightened. She reached for Karen's hand, but then Karen suddenly grabbed back at the motorcycle, swaying it. “Hey!” the boy called, “Get your friggin' kid off my bike!” Karen ran into the street. “And stay away!” the boy called.

It took Lee half a block to reach Karen, and even while she contained her in her arms, Karen was trying to escape. Her small body heaved. “It's okay,” Lee said, and suddenly all she could think of were those nights after Claire had died, when she had run and run through the neighborhood, half certain she heard Claire's breath just behind her.

When she got Karen home, Karen fell asleep in her lap. Lee, half dozing, glanced down, and for one moment the child in her lap wasn't Karen at all. All she saw was a sudden flutter of lids, a pair of eyes as luminous as her own, and deeply blaming, before the lids shut again.

Sometimes, when Karen was the stormiest, when she was flailing her arms, racing toward no destination at all, Lee felt the most moved. She recognized loneliness like that. It didn't matter if it inhabited a child or her own self. She knew how dangerous it made every bit of life, how much energy it took to steel yourself against it.

She knew something about how to deal with such a thing. She tried to treat Karen the way she had wanted to be treated. She tried never to touch Karen, and when Karen touched her, she kept herself slightly aloof. She wouldn't punish Karen's rages but instead burned them out with long tearing walks in the night. And she treated Karen just as if she were another adult. She didn't lie to her about anything. When Karen woke screaming from nightmares, Lee didn't turn on the lights and tell Karen there was nothing in the darkness that wasn't in the light. She never said there was no such thing as monsters. Instead she sat in the dark with her, with the moonlight creating shadows on the bed. She didn't touch her, but in a low calm voice she asked her about the nightmare, “What do you dream about?”

“Motorcycles,” whispered Karen.

Lee was silent for a minute. “And what do they do?”

“They chase me,” Karen said. Alarmed, she sat up. “Sometimes a ghost comes to my room.”

“A ghost?” Lee said quietly. “What ghost?”

“I don't know. I'm afraid to really look.”

“You talk to it?”

Karen's mouth trembled. “It always leaves too fast,” she said, falling against Lee. Lee didn't move, although her arm had fallen asleep. She settled against Karen and thought about ghosts, about all the voices you might hear whispering toward you, all the meaning you might miss.

The way Lee was suddenly taking to Karen surprised Andy. He loved kids. He wanted at least two, but he knew Lee wasn't crazy about them. He had seen how short she was with kids at the restaurant. He wasn't that crazy about Karen, but he had taken Lee's affection as a good sign. He liked it that he could come into her apartment and find her sprawled on the floor with a child. And he liked it even better that when Karen left she would keep close to him. She would seem to need him.

He didn't know what happened, when Lee began to change toward him. He came over one evening and she was coloring a map of Chile with Karen, the two of them not saying one word, not even to each other. He sat watching, reading a
Time
magazine that was two weeks old, and when he got up to leave, Lee looked at him as if she had just noticed he was there.

She began to cancel plans with him. Oddly protective, she sometimes wouldn't let him come to the house when Karen was there. “It disturbs her,” she said. But really it did something to the whole momentum. When Andy was there, things seemed to go wrong. The fuses blew. The apartment was much too hot or much too cold. And Karen seemed somehow more distant, as if Andy had put space between them.

“I'll come by later, then,” he said.

“Yes, please,” she said. So he showed up late those nights, and although the house was dean and empty of Karen, although she seemed glad to see him, she fell asleep against him almost instantly. Karen, he thought, and felt a vague flicker of anger toward her.

Karen knew everybody was mad at her. Valerie walked by her so fast, she seemed to create a wind. Roy stumbled over a chunk of her Erector set and kicked it violently against a wall. It didn't matter. No matter what Valerie kept telling her about this being her home, she knew that it wasn't. She was only going to be here for as long as it took her mother to find her. Roy told her he was her father now. Valerie called herself “Mother.” She had told her that her mother was gone, gone for good, but Karen didn't believe her for one minute. In Montana Karen had spent a lot of time at the next-door neighbor's because sometimes her mother didn't come home at night or even the next day, but eventually she showed up. How was anyone to know that this was different?

She watched the roads, She waited. She tried to dial on the heavy black phone that Valerie had placed too far for her to reach because Valerie didn't want her going anyplace, especially back to her mother. She could call so many numbers one of them would be her mother's. Every house she saw outside could be one with her mother in it. Every car could be her mother's. But every time she strained to look, Valerie would get angry. She'd hit her, tugging her away, keeping her prisoner. “Please behave now,” she said.

Sometimes, though, she could feel her mother near her. A presence, closing in. The smell of leather, the beat of her boots on the floor. Sometimes, too, at night, she could hear her whispering through the walls, calling
Karen, Karen
, and when she looked up there was a faint white mist, a ghost, terrifying her so that she'd tighten herself away, pulling the covers over her head so only her nose poked out. It isn't real, she told herself. It isn't my mother.

She remembered her mother, Cropped blond hair and long earrings Karen's hands were slapped away from. She remembered riding in front of her mother on the red motorcycle, a small hard helmet wrapped about her head with scarves. She couldn't see anything of her mother but her hands on the handlebars, but she could hear her breathy laughter. Sometimes, too, when the bike was parked out in the front, her mother would perch her on it alone, teaching her to drive.

She didn't remember a father. There were no pictures, no stories, and whenever she asked her mother, her mother just laughed. For a time, too, Karen remembered Jack, her mother's boyfriend. He had a ponytail and a leather jacket he sometimes draped about her shoulders, but not in a friendly way, and when he smiled at her she thought of wolves' teeth. Her mother shut the door of her bedroom the nights Jack was there. Karen was supposed to be in bed, but she always got up, prowling the dark living room until she found Jack's cigarettes. She played games with them, arranging them like dominos, breaking the tips and scattering tobacco like dandelion heads. Sometimes her mother would come out and put her to bed, sometimes Karen would just fall asleep on the rug. And in the morning Jack always looked at the cigarettes and shook his head admiringly. “Jesus. I musta really tied one on last night.” He shuffled fingers through Karen's hair and then left. Her mother, swollen-faced, surveyed Karen. “Okay, dirty puss, into the bath for the both of us,” she said.

The day her mother died, Karen had been at the neighbor's house. The woman's name was Tina. She lived alone, addressing envelopes at home for a living, and she had been happy to feed Karen noodles with butter and ice-cold Coke in a coffee mug. “There's your mum, I bet,” she had said when the phone rang. She wasn't on it two minutes when her face turned white. “You poor little piece of sugar,” she said to Karen, and then burst into tears.

Karen didn't believe for a moment that her mother was gone. She didn't believe it when Jack showed up, his face swollen, his eyes like spilled pools of ink. When he tried to hold her, she pulled away. She kept thinking there was a way to get back to her mother. If she was good.

She was silent when a policeman took her over to a big white house filled with children. Silent when she was brought into an office to talk to a woman who said she only wanted to help Karen. She was there only a little while, but in that time she was polite. She kept to herself, ignoring the other kids, She ate everything on her plate, even the oatmeal that made her want to throw up. Every time the door opened, she looked up. Then she was called back into the office and told how lucky she was, how some children waited for years for what was going to happen to her now. She was going to be adopted, but all she thought was that now her mother would never find her.

Every time Roy and Valerie acted like her parents, it made her furious. Every time Valerie hugged her, she felt like she couldn't breathe. Valerie's kisses felt wrong, like brands. Every word Valerie and Roy told her—mother, father, home—felt like the biggest lies she had ever heard. Who were they to lie to her, to pretend nothing had happened? She had to run and run around the house, whirling up a wind, just to roughly breeze those kisses off her. She had to scatter the house with screams to blot out all the lies. She had to move and shriek and break everything she could get her hands on to keep them seeing how she didn't belong there, to stop them from trying to swallow her whole.

Only once did she feel any hope, the night when Lee swung her into the night and the wind pushed against her back, the way her mother's hand might, the night Lee led her right past a motorcycle almost like her mother's. The way Lee had held her. Lee had hair the same yellow as her mother. Lee always acted as if she knew Karen belonged to someone else. “Where's Mommy?” she asked Lee, but Lee didn't say “Right here” or “Home with Roy.” Lee's face showed a brisk flicker of pain, and then Lee just looked at her as if she knew the answer and just wasn't telling yet.

10

Valerie didn't know when she started to mind Karen's new devotion to Lee. She should have been happy about how easy it was now to deposit Karen with Lee, how easy to take up her own life again, to work at the restaurant, to be with her husband. To forget. Instead she noticed how Lee smiled at Karen in a way Valerie had never seen before, how Karen calmed almost as soon as she touched Lee but grew rigid again if Valerie brushed by.

“I don't understand you,” Roy told her. “You should be glad she's willing to stay with Lee. And anyway, I thought you wanted time to yourself. Time for you and me.”

“I do,” she insisted. “Of course I do.”

Didn't she always have special plans on the nights Lee agreed to take Karen? Things you'd never dream of taking a child to. She and Roy dressed up because time to themselves seemed an occasion as special as any anniversary. They saw plays and concerts. They sat in movie theaters so blessedly quiet, she sometimes fell asleep in them. She'd go and meet Roy in some fancy four-star restaurant that discouraged children, and the whole time he was toasting her with the most expensive wine on the menu, she couldn't help wondering what Karen was doing with Lee. “Earth to Valerie,” said Roy, and she plucked up her wineglass. “To us,” she said, fixing her smile. She'd drink wine throughout the evening. She'd go home and make love to her husband as long as she wanted and there wouldn't be anyone else there to stop her.

“Thank God for Lee,” Roy said. He stroked the line of her face. Valerie fit herself deeper against his cupped palm and shut her eyes.

“Tell the truth, do you slip her a Mickey?” Valerie asked Lee. If she had once thought the problem was simply that she wasn't Karen's natural mother, she didn't think that anymore. Not when she saw Lee with Karen. She watched Lee, but she couldn't for the life of her see Lee doing one single thing differently.

What the hell did they do when she
wasn't
there? Lee just laughed when Valerie asked her. “We go for walks. We read. We play cards,” she said.

“You go for walks at night?”

“I'm with her.”

When she asked Karen, Karen was silent for a moment. “We go for walks,” she said, “Once we even walked here. We rang the bell, but you weren't home.”

“Well, of course I'm not home,” Valerie said. “That's why I bring you to Lee's.” She studied Karen. “I don't want you walking to the house,” she said. “It's too far and the roads are crazy.” She didn't mention that the real reason she didn't want Karen walking to the house was that sometimes she really
was
home. She'd pull the blinds and close the doors and just bask in the quiet disarray of her own house. And when she went to pick up Karen in the car, she always told her stories about where she had been. Helping Roy who was working late. Visiting a sick friend.