Into Thin Air (19 page)

“Thirty-five,” Jim said.

In the end he paid forty dollars for four blue candles. He lit them every night. He sat in the dull blue glow and waited for something different to happen, but in the end it didn't matter one way or another, because he still saw Lee everywhere, he saw her nowhere at all.

5

During that first year of disappearance, Lee felt that every place she drifted through was like another disguise.

She left Richmond for Atlanta, stepping out of a dusty train into a summer so boggy with heat that the people around her seemed to be vaguely stunned. Lee, still sick and chilled with fever, found the heat a comfort. She liked, too, the noise and confusion and the twisting crowds that all somehow seemed to fade her into a background.

Lee let herself be carried by the tide of people, spilling out with them through an open walkway into the simmering morning streets. The crowds siphoned into taxis and waiting cars, into twining, trapping embraces, and she kept walking. She had no idea where she was going, exactly; it only seemed somehow important that she keep moving, one unsteady sneaker after the other. And then, two blocks away, she stopped in front of the Bestways Motor Inn, as if that had been her intended destination all along, unrealized until she had actually arrived and found it right there in front of her.

There was a giant splintered wooden sign, shaped like a hand lifted in a friendly wave. Inside, a young girl slumped at the front desk over a comic book, her fraying black hair in two straggly braids tied with blue mending tape. Lee paid for two weeks up front, signing in as Anna Norfolk, the name of her first-grade teacher, a white-haired woman who gave out brand-new silvery-green rolls of Mist-o-Mint Life Savers for every report card with an A in it. The whole time, the girl at the front desk never looked at Lee.

For nearly the entire two weeks, Lee was cocooned in a cheap single room, emerging only twice to drag herself to the diner next door to buy salted crackers and soda from the vending machine, the only things she seemed to be able to keep down. The days melted together. The small, stifling room claimed her so entirely that sometimes, in the midst of the waves of fever, she thought she didn't exist at all. She'd waft up one of her hands and look at it, waggling her fingers, experimentally touching one thumb against the wavering pulse at her wrist. She'd stare at her sunken face in the bathroom mirror, tracing her nose, her cheekbones, the sudden new hollows around her mouth.

She had bolted the door, keeping the dusty blinds drawn, the window locked closed. She had shucked down to her T-shirt and panties and crawled into bed. She tried to sleep, rolling under a warming burrow of starchy sheets, delirium washing roughly over her. She could hear the rivery roar and hiss of the cars streaming past, The windows shivered from the sound.

Hallucinating, she transformed. She became things. A dark, quivering crow flying desperately into the air. A body without bones. And sometimes, too, she saw things. Rusty iron bars suddenly clanged into place across the window. A small infant's face scowled at her from a dark corner,

One morning she dreamed someone was shooting a hail of bullets at her door. Terrified, she woke. The door was still reverberating with sound. Her feet trembled against the floor, and as she padded toward it, the sound began to soften, to change into knocks. Shaking, she opened the door.

A patchy-haired man in a dark suit nodded at her politely. He introduced himself as the hotel manager. “Is something the problem?” he said quietly.

“No problem,” Lee said, He wavered in her focus. “Just a little flu.” She blinked. “Why?”

He shrugged. “There were some complaints.”

“Complaints?” Lee said, stricken.

“Oh, noise,” he said. “Shouting. Perhaps you were just having nightmares. One visitor thought you were being attacked, you were shouting so. That's why we checked.”

“What was I saying?” Lee said, dazed.

“If you're sick, if you have trouble sleeping, perhaps I can recommend a good doctor.”

“Oh. That would be fine,” Lee said. She watched him write something down. She tucked it into a curl of fingers. “Thank you,” she said, closing the door slowly.

That evening, in a stupor of fear, she fled the hotel, walking past the desk clerk as if nothing were more wrong with her than the fact that she was out of cigarettes. She walked two blocks back to the train station, stopping only for a package of strong, over-the-counter sleeping pills. She caught the next train out, ending up in Lubbock when she was simply too exhausted to travel farther.

She staggered from the train to a cab to the first hotel she saw, too cloud-headed to think of a different fake name from the last. Two days later her fever finally broke. She woke toward morning on the bare mattress, the sheets and blankets kicked to the floor. Her skin was dry and cool. She got out of bed, and everything in the room stayed where it was supposed to be. The air thinned to normal; colors stopped bleeding from their objects.

Healthier, she could focus enough to be nervous, to keep better watch. At first Lee wouldn't leave her room. She was terrified that as soon as she stepped onto the street, she'd feel this sudden steely grip on her arm and she'd turn around and see the police or a detective, or even Jim. Every blond head of hair might be Jim's. Other times she worried that he was disguised. He could dye his hair as easily as she had. He could be any number of people, biding his time, waiting for the right moment to bring her back to him. He could be here with the baby, a thought that made her slam her mind shut. Don't think about it, she told herself. Don't think, don't think, Panicky, she suddenly picked up the phone to call him, to see if he was really home. “Hello?” he said, and she was startled by the flood of anger she felt at hearing his voice, so soft and sad, so full of need.

She was getting stir crazy in the room, Finally she ventured out, head down, ignoring the desk clerk, an old man idly reading a newspaper. She walked to the local five-and-dime with Jim's money tucked into a wallet she wore under her clothes. She bought a child's white transistor radio. My First Radio, it was called. The whole walk home she felt the radio's presence, like her fortune, waiting to be told.

That evening she listened to the news with her eyes half-hooded, her body poised for flight, and all she kept thinking was that all those news stories were simply layers blanketing her whereabouts, and all someone would have to do would be to peel them away to find her.

When the news was over, she slid the dial to a rock station and lay back on the bed. Sometimes she got up and moved to the music, remembering what it had been like when she had danced on the front porch in a heady bath of gold moonlight, first with Jim, his hands cupped at the bone of her hips, standing so close against her, she could feel his heart trying to beat into her own. Later she had danced with the young girls who had wanted to be her at the very same time she was wanting to be them.

Lee felt so suddenly and vaguely lonely that she stopped in mid-lazy twirl and switched off the radio.

She began going out more and more. She bought maps. She went to three different gas stations to collect what she could and then finally went to a bookstore and bought an atlas, tearing out the pages she was interested in. She began to think about settling in someplace. She tacked the maps up in her room or she kept them in her purse, marking them with the towns she might like to go. Boilerville, Ohio. Porterhouse, Texas. Places where no one thought a thing about a girl so young living on her own, places where girls Lee's age might be leading exactly the kinds of lives that they wanted.

In Lubbock she watched herself transforming. Her voice took on a faint Texas twang. Her walk began to sway and lilt, partly from practice, partly from the red hand-tooled cowboy boots she had bought in a secondhand shop for twelve dollars. She began browning with a tan she couldn't help but collect. At night, when she slid out of her light summer dress, her skin was braced with white where the sun hadn't touched her, as pale as the stretch marks that branded her belly. Her hair turned brassy and red like a gilded penny from the combination of sun and cheap rinse-in drugstore color she had finally persuaded herself to buy. Mountain Peony, the color was called, chosen because it was the one package that didn't seem to have a picture of a woman leaning her dyed head up against the clean pure natural color of a baby for comparison.

She had planned to be here for only a month or so, but then the land began doing something to her. She loved the flat expanse of it, as if the environment had been pared down, simplified. She began falling in love with the way the tumbleweeds skittered across the highway and tangled into one another. They crunched up against the bumpers of the cars, attaching themselves like trophies. When she touched them, they seemed to dry-spark, splintering in bits against her fingers. She found she liked the broad spread of sky, the way it switched on at night into a brilliant spill of stars and planets. She liked the tang in the air, the silence in the early morning, broken by the lashing cry of jaybirds and crows.

She began to get tired of the hotel. She began to want a place that was all her own. People, she told herself, started new lives all the time, and she began to think that this could be a place where she might be able to do that.

She found an apartment almost immediately, a small studio she could sublet three months at a time. The permanent tenant, an art student on his way to try out California and a live-in girlfriend, showed only mild interest when Lee blurted that she was from New York. He didn't ask her a single question but simply took her two months' rent money and folded it calmly into his back pocket.

Lubbock, too, was the first place Lee would try to get a job, Jim's money was shrinking steadily and it made her afraid. She scanned the paper for possibilities. There wasn't much she was qualified for. She applied for jobs as a receptionist and a salesgirl. She took four typing tests, quickening the speed of the three fingers she pecked with, making so many errors that at one place the woman giving the test asked her politely if she were in the right place.

She finally got a job in the fall, at an answering service called Tell It to Us. She had seen an ad, and as soon as she called the number and said she was interested, the owner, a woman named Roxanne Harper, hired her on a trial basis. “Don't you want to meet me?” Lee said, astonished. Roxanne laughed. “Why, you think someone's going to see you?” she said. “You talk to voices, not people. All I need to know is how you sound on the phone, and you got a reasonable enough voice.”

Lee gave her a fake name, a fake history. She was Lara Michaels from North Dakota. She started making up a Social Security number when the woman stopped her. “Doll, I pay all my girls under the table,” Roxanne said. “It's my business, I can do what I like.”

Lee had to take two different buses to get to the Tell It to Us answering service. It took her half an hour each way, but she liked watching the tumbleweeds pinwheeling crazily on the road, liked hearing nothing more than the roll and swagger of the bus, the occasional muted conversation going on in the back. The trees, streaming past, were changing color. The air coming through an open window had bite.

The service was on the top floor of a small brownstone. She rang the buzzer and trudged up five dark flights to a room the size of a bathroom. Three peeling brown Leatherette chairs were rolled up against a narrow long desk, topped by a switchboard. On the far side was one small window with a white paper shade half-drawn. The only thing hanging on the beige wall was a large red clock.

In front of the switchboard were two women. One, much younger than the other, had cropped spiky brown hair, a set of headphones already clamped about her ears. The other, older, woman had dark hair, faintly receded, slicked back from her skull. Both women were wearing jeans and sweatshirts, and Lee, in the one clean dress she had, in heels she couldn't walk in, felt silly. The woman with the dark hair stood up. “Lara, right?” she said. “I'm Roxanne, this here is Dolly.”

Lee sat on a small wheeled Leatherette chair, still warm from Roxanne. The chair felt inhabited, somehow alive, and Lee shifted weight.

“Shorton, Rosen, and Latooter Plumbing,” Dolly sang with real melody into her headset. She reached for a square of yellow cardboard, punching it into a time clock and then beginning to write something on it. “Yes,
ma'am
,” she trilled.

“You got to watch that one,” Roxanne said. “They like you to sing the name out.”

Lee stared at the buzzing lights Dolly was plugging into. “Dr. Smilberg's office,” Dolly said in a bored, tight voice.

“Easy, right?” Roxanne said to Lee. “You watch the board. When a name lights up, you plug into it and speak whatever name is written under the light. Then you take one of these squares of paper and write the message and put it in the drawer under the light. At the end of the day, the people usually call for their messages. Then you toss them.”

She touched Lee's shoulder. “We'll try you out for three months. You do good, you got yourself a job.” She grinned. “There's your first light. Plug it up, doll. You're on.”

By the end of the first three hours, all Lee wanted to do was to go home. Nobody who called ever seemed to believe that she was really the answering service, People wading in flooded basements swore at Lee and asked her just who the hell she thought she was, charging the rates she did for plumbing and then not showing up, “I'm the answering service, it's not my fault,” Lee said.

“Don't use that sweet tone with me,” the caller said. “So full of sugar I'm surprised you don't have ants. You get over here or I'll sue you for the water damage to my house.”

Exasperated, Lee looked over at Dolly, who was idly twirling her phone wire, ignoring Lee altogether.

She started to be privy to these little human disturbances. Bailey Bondsman got about a call an hour. Women, their voices shattered with sobs, always wanted to tell Lee that their husband or boyfriend or son hadn't done whatever he was being jailed for. A man, needing bail for a son who had held up a toy store, spoke with Lee in a voice as cold and hard as smashed pieces of ice.