Into Thin Air (42 page)

He didn't know how, but the world had stopped being ordinary. The air crackled with possibility. If he had seen the March Hare lope into his pharmacy, he wouldn't have been surprised. Memory floated on every surface, rising up over the present, obliterating it until he'd feel himself metamorphosing, nine years back, the old Jim again, an old life starting up again. He'd remind himself that she hadn't come back for him, her face lit up when she saw Joanna, not him—and he…well, hadn't he stopped waiting the day he had married Lila? He told himself it was just the past, these flickerings of the old desire, as keen and yearning as the day he had met Lee, and as impossible.

He struggled for balance. He didn't want her around, but when she wasn't he somehow missed her. He ate himself up worrying how she might go to his house. She might confront Lila, she might somehow win his daughter, who, despite all the hugs and attention he and Lila showered her with, still sometimes seemed starved for affection. He didn't want Lee out of his sight, and he began to encourage her to come to the pharmacy, where he could at least watch her, where he could torture himself in the bargain. Oh, how he hated her. He loved her. He felt nothing and everything and a supreme, overriding anger.

“Let me have time with Joanna,” she asked him. “I won't tell her who I am. Not until she's used to me.”

“No,” he said. “I don't think that's good. And I don't want you disturbing Lila.”

“Lila,” Lee said. She thought of that woman, her red hair flashing, her eyes dark. “Have I been to the house since the first time? Have I called her? I haven't even walked by the house.” She lied about that. She didn't tell him how some nights when she couldn't sleep she walked silently down her old street, and every time she stepped over a roller skate or a toy, she'd have to stop and touch it, wondering if it belonged to her daughter. She'd look at her old house and imagine the life going on in it. She didn't feel anything toward Jim except a sad regret, but she wondered, if she had stayed, would she? If she had given it the time Jim had begged for?

“She loves Joanna,” he said.

Lee stiffened. “So do I,” she said.

“Hah, You love her. What do you know about love?”

Lee felt herself collapsing. “I know something,” she said.

“You don't even know her,” Jim said. “Did you sit up with her when she was screaming with an ear infection? Did you help her learn to read or listen to her cry or patch up her scrapes?” He dug his hands in his pockets. “We're a
family
, Lee.”

“I know.” Lee heaved a breath. “Look, what do you want me to do? Just tell me and I'll do it.”

“You think you can just flash in here and confuse Joanna and then flash out again?” Jim demanded.

“Nobody's flashing anywhere,” Lee said. “Come on. Sit down with me someplace, Jim. Let's just talk. Come on. I'll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“The truth?” he said. “No bullshit?”

“The truth,” Lee said.

They walked over to a nearby park and sat on a bench, and almost as soon as she was settled, she started to talk. He spent two hours with her, talking about the past, about why she had left, about what she had been doing, and the whole time he only half believed what she told him. “That didn't happen,” he kept interrupting her. He kept watching her eyes to see when she didn't meet his gaze; he kept her mouth in sight to see what it wasn't telling. It seemed to him that she remembered everything wrong, that she had left on a complete falsehood about him. “How was I stopping you from doing anything?” he demanded. “Didn't I tell you to go back to school? I never stopped you.”

She looked at him. “Yes, you did.”

“You wanted the baby.”

She shook her head, but when she told him about the two failed abortion attempts, he stood up, pacing. “I don't believe this,” he said. “This conversation isn't really happening, is it? We still could have worked things out,” he insisted. “If you had let yourself, you would have loved me so much you never would have left.” He roughly brushed his hair from his face. “Don't you think that's true?” he said.

I don't know, Lee said. It's like we're talking about a different person now—” She saw him flinch, and then she quickly touched his shoulder. “I know, though, that if you had been able to find me, you would have been able to convince me to come home.”

“That's love,” he said. “You can't tell me it isn't.”

“You know what else?” Lee said. “If I had seen Joanna for one moment, I never would have been able to stay away.”

His mind reeled. He kept reimagining his daughter's birth. All he had had to do was gently tilt Lee's face toward the baby's when she was born. All he had had to do was sit by her hospital bed with the baby so that they were the first two things she would have seen. None of this would have happened.

“Why did you come back now?” he said.

“I had time to work things out,” Lee said.

“Great. It took you nine years to work things out.” He stood up to leave and then sat back down again. “How did that happen? What do you do in Madison?”

He kept asking her questions about her past without him. He thought she'd tell him about nights so lonely that she'd go to all-night supermarkets just to have some company. He thought she'd tell him about food stamps and typing jobs and clothing picked from Kmart. A little regret, a little need, all snowballing, leading her back to him. But instead she told him about finding her first friend, finding a job she could do well, a man whom she used to see. Everything she revealed ended up somehow hurting him, and then he was instantly sorry she had told him anything at all.

“What's she like?” Lee said quietly.

He knew she meant Joanna, but he suddenly felt mean and small, as if his heart had atrophied to the size of a peach pit. “She's a nurse,” he said. “And she's wonderful.” Lee blinked, surprised at how such a thing could nick at her and hurt. She wondered suddenly what he and Lila talked about at night, if he brought her flowers, if he loved her one-tenth of how much he had loved Lee when she was just seventeen and absolutely impervious to anybody's love, especially his. Lee shook off the image. She had no right to care.

“We could be the same person, we're so close,” Jim said.

Lee leaned forward so that they were almost touching. “Are you going to let me see Joanna?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“I'm not going to blurt out to her that I'm her mother,” Lee said. “I just want to get to know her, give her time to like me a little first.” She touched Jim's sleeve. “I know how to act with kids.”

“Really?” he said. “How?”

She was suddenly silent. “What?” he said, but she just shook her head. “Look,” she said finally. “What's to stop me from just going to see her myself?”

“Abandonment's a crime, isn't it?” he said coldly. He felt like a fool. He'd never call the police.

“I'm going to see her,” Lee said.

He waited, he kept watch, but she didn't call the house or show up. She stayed away from the school, and she came to the pharmacy a few times, when she knew Joanna would be at school. She came, he thought, to see him. She sat at the old cherrywood counter like a work of art. He could look up from his work and see pieces of her, a prism of shining hair, a section of her blue dress, refracted among the aisles of shampoo or a sudden rush of customers. Sometimes, when he was counting pills, he was so concentrated on her that he would give a customer three pills too much or twelve too little.

If she couldn't see Joanna, she could have news about her. She asked Jim about Joanna as a baby, about Joanna in kindergarten, about every period of her life except what was going on now. And she asked him for photos.

“You weren't around for the real thing, what makes you think photos'll do it?” he said. He was determined not to bring her one thing, and that morning, when he dressed, he riffled through the photos for a moment. He used to have all these pictures of Lee. Lee in a light summer dress, her hair skating down her back. Lee pregnant, looking thin and frightened, her arms around her blooming belly. He had kept those photos hidden away in a shoebox in the attic because he didn't want to upset Lila, and, too, he didn't need to upset himself, to keep pulling open that wound. He hadn't looked at them in years, but now suddenly he climbed up to the attic and plundered through the debris. He couldn't find the box at first. He had to plow through some old skirts of Lila's, some toys of Joanna's she refused to let anyone throw out because she “was saving them for her own children.” When he found the box he felt something unraveling in his stomach. He opened the lid and stared at the first photo, Lee sitting in cut-off denim shorts and a T-shirt on their porch, smiling up at him lopsidedly. She looked so young, like the teenage daughters of some of the families on the block. Like a memory. He closed the box and shoved it back under Lila's skirts.

He thought he'd just bring a few pictures, because he was so angry, because he'd show her how he had had a family, how she was no longer a part of it. He picked the ones with Lila in them, with Maureen or his mother, with all the women Joanna knew and loved.

“My pride and joys,” he said, handing her the pictures. She looked at the shots. They seemed like the photos of a stranger. The small baby face turned toward the camera could have belonged to the woman in front of her at the Shop Rite yesterday. The toddler in overalls and a flowered hat could have been the neighbor's, not hers. Only the recent photos gave her some comfort. She could at least recognize her daughter in them. She could recognize Lila and Jim.

She tried to listen to what Jim was telling her about each picture, but the more information he gave her, the more confused she became.

“Mrs. Mannama took that shot,” he said, holding up a picture of Joanna, recognizable in a paper pilgrim collar.

“Who?” said Lee.

“The mother of one of her schoolmates.”

“Oh,” Lee said. She tried to imagine it. She had never once noticed the school the whole time she had lived here. She couldn't remember even driving past it. School. An image flashed. Karen carrying a cardboard hand she had made in kindergarten. She felt something wrenching inside of her. “Well, look at you,” she said, showing Jim a photo of himself in a tuxedo, Lila in a gown. “Big night,” she said.

He looked at the photo thoughtfully. “Yes, it was,” he said, but he didn't tell her how.

It wasn't until Jim was nearly through the pictures that Lee decided to steal some. All of them of her daughter. One from each year. She waited until he went to attend to a customer, a woman who wanted to know if her itching salve might work on her cat. And then she quietly slipped a few photos into her purse. And when he came back toward the counter, she gave him an open, innocent smile.

She wouldn't look at the pictures until she got to her hotel. She spread them across the white chenille spread, her hands trembling. Jim had told her what each picture was, but here in her hotel she couldn't remember. She got up and got the small nail scissors she had bought on a whim, a ridiculous buy since she bit her nails to the quick. She carefully scissored out all the other women, Lila in a red bathing suit, that nosy Maureen in a flowery housedress no one wore anymore, Jim's mother, who had never once met Lee. She threw all those faces in the basket and then ferreted through the pictures of her daughter again, the jagged edges catching against her skin. She lifted up a black-and-white picture of a baby on a blue blanket, surrounded by lawn. Where had Jim said this was? She turned the print over, hoping for a faint scrawl, a way to place the image in time. The back of the picture was blank. She lifted up another picture. More recognizable. Joanna, her long hair in knotty pigtails, dressed as a cowgirl. Halloween, Lee decided. She could show this picture to people and say, “This is my daughter at Halloween. This is her cowgirl outfit. Look, we both have long hair.” It seemed such a stingy thing to have so little to say about a life.

The next day she walked over to the pharmacy around four, seating herself at the counter and ordering hot chocolate. She didn't get up to try to talk to him. She sat quietly reading from a paperback she had in her purse, until it was almost closing time, and then she approached him. “Let me take you to dinner,” she said.

“My wife's cooking dinner,” he said.

“I just want to see Joanna,” Lee said.

“Not tonight,” he said, and ushered her outside, leaving her standing there on the sidewalk. He kept his neck so rigid that he couldn't have turned around to look at her even if he had wanted to.

He knew Lila was worried about Joanna. “Tell her to leave,” Lila said. “She doesn't deserve to see Joanna. She'll only confuse her.”

“I know how Lee is,” he said. “She'll be leaving soon.”

He didn't tell her that he was worried, too. Every time he saw her walk into the pharmacy, he thought he should go to the phone and call a good lawyer, get a restraining order. And then he thought about Joanna, and then he thought about what damage a journalist could do, covering a simple custody case, digging a little deeper, and rediscovering that whole weird disappearance years ago, back when Jim was a suspect.

He didn't know what to do, didn't have a clue what was the right thing to do, for Joanna or anybody.

One day, when Lila had to work, he picked up Joanna after school and brought her to the store. “Can't she stay with Maureen?” he said. He didn't want to tell Lila that sometimes Lee was there.

“Maureen's got a cold,” Lila said.

The whole ride in the car, Joanna kept looking at houses. “Why don't we move?” she said. She found the schools, pointing them out to him. “That would be a nice school,” she insisted. “Look at the kids! They look great!”