Into Thin Air (37 page)

He wasn't used to her needing him so much. “Talk to me,” he said. “You have to talk about it.” But every time he even started to probe, she wrenched from him. “I loved her,” Lee said. “And I thought Valerie was my best friend.”

“You've got to give her some time.”

Lee faced him. Her skin was so pale it seemed to shimmer. “What about me?” she said.

“Well, it's different,” he said. “She wasn't your little girl.”

Lee flinched. She bent to scoop up her sweater from the dusty floor, tugging it onto her arms.

“Where're you going?” he said.

She didn't look at him. “What are you doing?” he said. She shoved up the sleeves of her sweater. “You're right,” she said, crying. “She wasn't.” And then, abruptly, she walked out his door.

Roy had refused to hold any sort of service or funeral, Karen was to be cremated, and as far as he was concerned the place could keep her ashes. He didn't want to be there, and he didn't want Valerie to be there, either. The day of Karen's cremation he set the alarm for five in the morning. In a morning white with fog, they threw on jackets and got in the car, so that by the time the sun was burning off the haze, they were out of the state altogether. All they did that day was drive, the radio bebopping Top 40 hits, the two of them switching off driving every few hours. Neither one of them spoke or pointed out sights or did anything but look straight ahead. They stopped at Howard Johnson's to use the bathrooms and to buy cans of Coke they didn't really drink, and when they passed families with kids Valerie would avert her face. It wasn't until the sun was setting that he turned around and started the drive back again, taking his time, gauging the trip so that they wouldn't be back until the next afternoon altogether.

He knew it was different with Valerie, but Karen was burned out of him. All he cared about now was what he had always cared about. Valerie. He had all these plans. What else was there to do with the time but make plans? He shaped a future for them. He was moving her to California, to stay with his parents, who had a house right on the beach. The salt air could sting memory away. They'd both have enough time to find new jobs, create lives. He could sell the restaurant and use the money to start up a new one if that was what Valerie wanted. He had closed the place for a month, but he could reopen it, let it run itself for a while, and give her time to decide. The best thing about California was the fact that there were no seasons. He wouldn't have to shore up against any other fall. He wouldn't have to avoid looking at a leaf burnished with color for the way it would make him sick. No, there'd be one long, endless, dazzling summer. A marking of time that was completely in place.

He took care of his wife. Every night he lay with her resting against his shoulders, and every time she told him what a bad mother she had been, he hushed her. “Listen,” he murmured. He told her bedtime stories about the lives they were going to be leading. He talked to her the way he had talked to Karen, paring down his language, softening his tone. “We can start a whole new restaurant,” he told her. “We can call it East Coast California. You like that? Or maybe just California East. We'll serve bagels. We'll import waitresses from New York who'll be so rude they'll charm the customers.” Valerie half smiled. “We'll both tan,” he promised. “We'll get a large rangy dog and make it wear a red bandanna about its neck.” She smiled again. “A blue bandanna,” she said. “I like blue.” She trailed two fingers along the side of his face, as tender as if his skin were glass. The stories seemed to calm her, and when he caught sight of her face, she looked almost as if she believed him, and eventually she would fall asleep.

Every time Lee called Valerie, Valerie would hang up on her. She was in bed with Andy one evening when he told her that Valerie and Roy were planning on moving. “They need the change,” he said.

“Oh, no,” Lee said. She moved closer to him, wrapping one arm about his hip. He hated himself for it, for almost basking every time she clung to him. He recognized the grief in her need, but sometimes, too, he told himself he recognized something else, something quite different.

“They're selling the restaurant,” he said.

Lee got out of bed, tossing the coverlet over Andy.

“Hey, they're not selling it right now,” Andy said.

Lee was pulling eggs out of the refrigerator, a mixing bowl from under the sink. Andy simply sat on one of Lee's chairs and watched her bake. She was a good cook. He could already recognize the things on Valerie's menu that were hers just by tasting them. There was always some mysterious ingredient he couldn't pinpoint. He rested his chin on the edge of the chair. She had a dot of flour on her chin. “Lemon upside-down cake,” she said.

“What's the secret ingredient?” he said, but she was pushing the cake tins into the oven, and even after the cake was frosted and cooling under a bonnet of waxed paper, when they were both back in bed, she wouldn't tell him.

Lee took the cake to Valerie's the next day, before even one car was in front of the door. Lee rang the bell, but when Valerie saw Lee, her face shut in upon itself. Lee held out the cake pan awkwardly, keeping her arms stretched until finally Valerie opened the door.

“Andy told me you're leaving next week,” Lee said. “Don't go. Don't do it.”

Valerie stepped back toward the house.

“Andy'll give me your address,” Lee said.

“I guess Andy will give you whatever you want,” Valerie said. She wrapped her hair about her hand, knotting it.

“I'm going to write you,” Lee said. “I don't care what you say. I'm going to keep writing and one of these days you'll write me back. I know it.”

“There's the phone,” Valerie said, but there was no sound. “You were my first real friend,” Lee said. Valerie stood perfectly still for a moment. “Don't you believe me?” Lee cried, and then Valerie quietly took the cake.

“Don't throw the cake out,” Lee said. “Please. Eat it. It has six eggs in it.” Valerie looked down at the cake in her hands and then, turning, finally shut the door.

They left before the house was even sold. Andy had hired an agent to take care of things. Lee felt as if there were a fissure in time, All Lee could think about was her father wandering happily with her through rooms other people had lived in. Perfect for a child, he used to say, pushing Lee forward with a touch so gentle that even now, remembering, it made her yearn.

Lee began going back to work, The restaurant had been sold to an accountant, who wanted it only as a tax shelter. He showed up one day with Andy, following Andy so gingerly into the kitchen that it seemed as if he had done something wrong. He was young and sloppy, and he kept shrugging, “Meet the new owner,” Andy said, “Hank Malorian.” Lee stopped stirring a sauce. The waitresses clumped together. “Nothing's going to change,” Hank said. He had kept the original name. He didn't fire or hire one new person. “The head chef, he's in charge now,” Hank said, pointing to Rico, a twenty-four-year-old Spanish expatriate who had already published a cookbook on greens. Hank told them he had no intention of ever coming to the restaurant at all, because the embarrassing truth was that he really preferred to eat at home. He made his hands a semicircle. “I know investments. You guys know restaurants.”

Nothing changed, but everything changed. The old customers kept coming, but new ones, having read about Karen in the papers, came, too, out of curiosity at first and then because they liked the food. Lee couldn't risk standing idle for one single moment, so she began doing more than waitressing. Whenever she could she busied herself cooking. Reckless, she threw herself into projects, lulled by the rhythms of the kitchen, never really thinking if a recipe might work. Some of them did, enough so that all Rico had to do was take a taste and want it on the menu. “You take risks,” he told her, tasting the roasted red pepper soup she had made. “Keep on surprising me like that and I'll make you second chef. How'd you like that? A
career
, not just a job.” She flushed with pleasure.

What's in this? he asked her, but when she shrugged he became annoyed. “Memory. That's all recipes are. And if you don't remember, you won't ever be able to have this delicious dish again. And neither will anyone else. You start remembering. That's part of your job description.”

She remembered. At five o'clock she couldn't go outside the kitchen because every time the door opened, it would remind her. She would almost swear she saw a small dark head. She walked past Valerie's house, and although there was a new blue station wagon parked neatly in the drive, she expected the front door to slap open any minute, for Valerie to run across the lawn and embrace her.

She remembered the accident, taking it apart second by second. If she had not been raking, would Karen be alive? If she had run faster, if she had shouted louder. She kept thinking about this thing she had once read in one of Jim's science books. Something about the new physics. Something about probable universes. Every event had several probable outcomes, and every one of those outcomes could somehow be occurring somewhere in space and time. Karen, she thought. A probable Karen sidestepping a car to fling herself, hot and damp and churning with emotion, into Lee's embrace. A probable Karen growing up close to Lee. A probable Valerie staying the best of friends. A probable Lee who was anything but what she was—miserable and lost and seeming to fade from life.

Every day she felt herself growing smaller, more compact. She needed less air to breathe. She had to remind herself to eat, and even then, after a few forkfuls, she was stuffed. Her jeans bagged so that she dug a new hole in the belt she used to cinch them with. Her skin seemed translucent, as if you could see the heartbeat beneath it. Sometimes now, when Andy touched her, she couldn't even feel him. “You all right?” he whispered, concerned. She rolled in his arms when he made love to her, but she didn't feel herself participating. “I'm fine,” she said, but she was helpless, traveling away from him, so fast that even if he had tried to, he couldn't have managed to stop her.

It hurt her even to look at Andy. Already she saw shadowy images of other women at his side, women from a probable universe who deserved him, women who didn't belong to their memories. She should have turned away from him the first time he had thought he could rescue her, pulling her from the heavy blank white of a storm.

She didn't know what had happened. It was impossible, but suddenly she didn't see Karen anywhere. When other children came into the restaurant, they didn't remind her of Karen. When she passed a school yard, she wasn't drawn to every crop of dark hair jumping rope, to every tomboy scuttling on hands and knees. Instead she suddenly saw a world full of blond little girls, of shy little voices talking about gerbils, Instead she saw her daughter.

She lay awake at night and thought about her. Joanna. She remembered the voice, as high and thin as a wire. She wished she had held her when she had been born—she never would have left her then. She would have known her daughter's scent, the texture of her skin and the blue of her eyes. If she had given herself two seconds with her baby daughter, she never would have been able to escape.

Now when she made desserts in the restaurant, they weren't for Karen anymore, they were for Joanna. She made cupcakes in the shapes of clowns; she put extra powdered sugar in the frosting. Karen hadn't been hers, but Joanna was. If they were together, she could hold her in her arms and feel another heart beating up against hers. If they were together, she could look into those eyes and see back into a past that connected them both. And a future. She lightened.

She began dreaming about Joanna. She hadn't left the hospital at all. She had gone home with her baby and with Jim. She and the baby had piled into the car and driven to see her father, and as soon as he saw Lee holding her baby, he had burst into tears. He had pushed past Janet to welcome them into his home. She sometimes dreamed about Joanna's room in Jim's house. She never saw Jim, but she saw herself sitting on the edge of a small white bed, next to a small child, and she was singing. When she woke up she was so weak with longing, she couldn't get up from the bed. Lying there, she thought about Joanna, and then she realized she couldn't remember what she had been singing in the dream. She didn't know any real songs, she couldn't remember any from Claire, and she knew she had never sung to Karen. And that afternoon she went to the library and took out a children's record. She played it late at night, humming along, memorizing, and when she went to bed she lay there singing “I Went to the Animal Fair” and “The Ash Grove,” her low clear voice soothed over her like a blanket, lulling her to sleep.

She began to hum and sing the songs more and more.

“What are you singing?” Andy said, amused. “I swear I hear ‘Bah Bah Black Sheep.'”

“It's just something I remember,” she told him.

She began to wear her memories like a weight. She still loved cooking, but somehow it became muddied. She'd see a child's fingerprints in the pie she was making; she'd hear a child's laugh just to the right of the stove, a presence calling her so strongly, it hurt her. She stopped what she was doing and pressed her hands about her head. “You don't look like you feel so hot,” one of the other cooks told her. “Why don't you go home. I'll cover for you.”

“Thanks,” Lee said. She started walking home, thinking it might clear her head, but every block there suddenly seemed to be a new travel agency started up. She kept spotting people carrying suitcases or speaking in East Coast accents. A little girl in a cherry-red coat skipped alongside her tall blond mother.

That night, when she saw Andy, she instantly began crying. He rolled her in his arms. “Let me see that pretty face,” he said. He gently swiped at her tears. “Tell me what's wrong.”