Into Thin Air (38 page)

She lifted her chin, snuffling. Her tears were pooling against his T-shirt.

“Did something happen at the restaurant?” He tickled her under her chin. “You want me to go beat up the new owner?”

She half smiled and shook her head. To amuse her he started humming the parts of “The Ash Grove” he remembered her singing. She laughed a little, and then she sat up, studying him. “Do you think I'm a bad person?” she said finally.

He grinned. “Absolutely,” he said. “The most evil I've ever met.” He kissed strands of her hair. “What's this about, Lee?”

“I don't know. I'm just a little blue,” she said, lowering her gaze from his. She lay against him, heartbeat to heartbeat, and she wanted to ask him. What happened to people if they decided to suddenly reappear after years of disappearance? She wanted to know if leaving your baby was a crime you could be put in jail for, if coming back for her was equally criminal. She had a million terrifying questions she wanted to ask, a million terrifying things she wanted to tell him, but no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn't. How could she trust someone she had been lying to for so long, how could she ever think he might ever forgive her?

Andy owned stacks of law books, but instead she went to the library. She wouldn't bring any of the books to the tables but instead stood in the aisles, balancing one heavy text after another, trying to find out if she were still legally her daughter's mother. She read through forty different custody cases, ending up more confused than when she began. She was afraid to call a lawyer. She didn't know who knew Andy and who didn't, who might have known she was Andy's girlfriend, who might casually ask Andy how come she was so interested in custody and abandoning mothers all of a sudden.

The more she thought about Joanna, the more she began thinking about her father and about Jim, too, and the more she thought, the more real they became to her, as if they were hurtling through time toward her. Had they waited at train stations, thinking she might be coming home? Did they ever do the same things out of habit, like a ritual, the way she set out cookies at four for Karen, thinking, Somehow this must be a mistake, this must not be the way the afternoon was going to end, turning into silence, solidifying into an evening so endless it was all you could do to get through it. Did her daughter ever feel a kind of odd nameless yearning toward a picture of a woman everyone said was her mother?

When she thought of Jim, a sudden river of grief and pity swelled within her. She kept remembering his sad, slow face, the face she had helped to create. The only way she could ever give him back those years was to tell him about her half of them.

It terrified her. She lay awake at night thinking what might happen if she went back, what might be the scenario. Sometimes she saw herself walking up to her father's door, and then abruptly her father would strike her, just as if she had been seventeen. Sometimes she'd see Jim bolting the door against her, or else he'd stare at her uncomprehending, as if he had been looking for her so long, he no longer knew who she was at all. Sometimes she saw Joanna running to her and sometimes running away. But the thing was, once she saw herself holding her daughter, she couldn't think of one single event past that.

It made her tired. She'd sit down to dinner with Andy, and it seemed to her as if there were always a ghost or two insistently dining with them.

“Hey, you don't have to keep getting up. You're not playing waitress with me,” Andy told her. She laughed. “Oh, it's fine,” she said. She couldn't tell him she kept getting up because of the way her past wouldn't let her present continue.

It was too hard. She was too weak and cowardly to barge back into lives she had once left for good. She had Andy. She had a job. A home. And then she'd think of Karen, staring at a motorcycle that looked like her mother's, and she'd think of her own daughter, a girl she had never once looked at, a girl who had nothing more of Lee than photos, and then she'd know there was nothing else to do but to go.

The next evening, right after work, she stopped at a travel agency. It was half-empty. A woman with black hair severely pulled back with a rhinestone clip nodded at Lee. “Where to?” she said.

“Baltimore,” Lee said. “No. No. Philadelphia first. Then a flight on to Baltimore.”

The woman's head dipped. She pecked out something on a computer and squinted at it.

“Round trip?” the woman said.

Lee was silent for a moment. The air suddenly seemed to have weight. Anything could happen. “One way,” Lee blurted.

She had three weeks before she left, but already she felt herself traveling back through time. The past shimmered and expanded before her, crowding out her present. She could be walking by the maple trees out front, and all she would smell was the lilacs and the wisteria that were growing in the Baltimore backyard she remembered. She couldn't help but get lost because if she didn't look really closely the street signs now bore names like Eutaw Place and Hughs Avenue instead of Miffland and University and Oakes.

If anyone had asked her, if she had been able to talk about it at all, she would have said it was a relief. It was easier to wear your past like sudden new blinders, easier not to see too clearly just what it was that might not be waiting for you if you came back, because then leaving might wound you so much, you might never be able to continue.

Andy came over to cook her dinner, and the whole time he was cutting vegetables she sat dreaming on a chair in the other room, half hearing the conversation he was making. When she sat down to eat, she toyed at the salmon he had made, she stared out the window.

“Do you want to tell me what's going on?” Andy said. “Don't make me ask what's wrong fifty times.”

“Nothing's wrong,” she said.

“Do you think that helps either of us?”

She set down her fork, angled on the plate, a signal she had learned to recognize when she was waitressing, a sign that the meal was finished.

“I have to go away,” she said finally, not looking at him.

“Away? Why?” he said.

She looked down at her plate. Already she was traveling. She concentrated on the hum of the plane beneath her.

“Are you coming back?”

“I don't know.”

“Can I come with you?”

“No,” she said.

“I don't believe this!” he said. “Why are you going? Aren't you going to tell me?” He waited, and when she was still silent he turned away from her.

“What's happened to us?” he said desperately. “You still care about me. I know you do.” He stroked her hair, and as soon as she felt his hands, she couldn't help herself, she didn't care how much it was going to hurt later when she remembered, she leaned against him. “I do,” she said.

“So what is it?” he cried. “What's going on?”

“Look, I—” She stumbled. Every time she looked up and saw his face, she felt something crumbling. “Don't you think I love you?” she said finally.

“Then why are you going?” he said.

She looked down at her hands. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to take care of something. It just can't wait.”

“What? What something?”

“Please,” Lee said. He looked at her, completely baffled. “Lee—” Then he stopped. He traced one finger along her chin.

“Okay, you don't have to tell me. But whatever it is, it doesn't matter,” he said. “Believe me, it doesn't. We'll work it out together.”

Lee felt herself tottering at the edge of something dangerous. She could reach out her hand and touch his face. She could wrap herself about him and he'd hold her and rock her and love her and never ever ask her one single question she didn't want to answer, and if she could let it go at that, they could be happy. She could learn to look the other way every time she saw a small blond child. She could learn not to look at a map too closely or a crowd scene on the news. One more step and she might never be able to get back. She looked at Andy. She smelled the lime after-shave he sometimes used. The kitchen tell into a focus so dazzling, she felt dizzy. Exhausted, she rested her head against Andy's shoulder.

“Don't go,” he whispered. An image flickered in her mind, Karen standing in her kitchen holding a dripping plastic shark. “I thought you had gone!” she had cried. And then, in that moment, it didn't matter how much she was going to miss Andy, how much it was going to hurt. It mattered only that she find her rather and Jim and her daughter again, it mattered only that she somehow fix things so she could stop running, so she would never again be in this position, where someone was having to beg her and beg her not to go.

“I'm sorry,” she told him, her voice a whisper.

“Well then,” Andy said, pained. He resettled on his chair, and as soon as he moved away from her, she felt him becoming dimmer. “I guess, then, I have to go now, too.”

The week before she left, Andy turned icy with civility. He had thought she was just angry, that she wasn't really going to leave. Even when he saw the suitcase, he still had thought it was just acting out. Cases could be unpacked, after all, tickets returned. When he caught her shivering by the window, her palms pressed against the chilly glass, he sometimes would try to take her shoulders. “I guess you think I'm going to ask you where the hell you're going, but I'm not,” he said. Something flickered in her face, a look he recognized from false witnesses in his courtroom.

He couldn't quite bring himself to ignore her, because every evening he thought might be his last with her, which terrified him, but he never for a moment thought it might be terrifying her as well. He began missing her, sometimes the most when she was right there beside him. They ate long silent dinners in good restaurants, where he insisted she order desserts she barely touched. They sat numb in movie theaters, a small bucket of greasy popcom uneaten between them. Around them couples whispered and laughed too loudly or got up during the second plot point. They sat perfectly still until the closing credits were over. Sometimes they were the last people in the theater, and when they got up neither one of them could remember much about what had gone on on the screen, and then he took her home.

He never went home himself, though. He parked the car a block away from her house, willing himself to stay awake, to make sure she wasn't leaving. Once, not more than ten minutes after he had seen her enter her house, he saw her leave it again. She was burrowing into her leather jacket, and he bolted out of the car, ready to follow her. She was halfway down the street when she turned abruptly, watching him. Her eyes were luminous. Her hair showered down her back. “I'm just walking,” she said stiffly. He was so humiliated he backed away from her, nodding curtly. Then he took the car, but he went to an all-night supermarket. There were only four or five other people in there, two couples and a young woman dressed all in black who kept giving him sharp, hopeful stares. He was methodical, grabbing a steel cart, pushing it down each and every aisle, and never taking one single item from one single shelf. It took him only twenty minutes to peruse the entire market, and then he replaced the cart carefully and walked outside again. He couldn't go back to Lee's, not that evening, so instead he went back to the courtroom and in the silence looked through cases. There were laws, things made sense. People who lied were punished.

The night before Lee was to leave, he came home drunk. He had performed a wedding just that day, to a couple so in love they had kissed through the whole ceremony. They had been so oblivious that they hadn't seen the stricken look on his face. Lee could smell the alcohol, she saw it reeling in his walk as he came toward her. His face was tight and miserable and angry, and for one instant, it was all she could do to not touch him, to not give up or take him with her. Instead she flattened herself along the wall.

“I'm not going to be around when you get back,” he said.

“Come on, sit down,” she said.

“If you get back.”

She led him into the bathroom and hinged his legs down so he was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. She drew him a bath. “Was I wrong to think we cared about each other?” he said. “Tell me. Was I wrong?” She couldn't bear to look at him. She couldn't risk being pulled back. She twisted, turning off the spigots, and started to undo his shirt. “Come on,” she said. “Please.” She refused to get in it with him, but she sat beside him while he soaked, and neither one of them looked at each other. He began splashing water into his face, so violently that she began to know he was crying. That night they slept naked in his bed, and although the bed was very small, they didn't touch, and in the morning, when Andy woke up, his heart drowning within him, Lee was gone.

She almost turned around at least five times. She was suddenly paralyzed with fear that she was on a fool's mission, that she might never see her daughter. It had been years. She had heard a woman's voice on the phone, joking with Joanna, soothing. What kind of person had she been that she could just leave—and what kind of person was she that she could just come back? Maybe she'd just watch Joanna at a distance, make sure she was all right. Maybe she could talk to Jim in private, tell him that all she wanted was for her daughter to know that her mother was in the world.

She might never see her daughter. She might never see Jim. And she might never see Andy again. She should have told him the truth the day she had met him. She should have walked away from him the day she had first seen him. She boarded the plane to Philadelphia and her father, already missing Andy so much that she stumbled. She was so unsettled, the flight attendant asked her if she wanted an aspirin.

11

As soon as the bus from the plane pulled into the Philadelphia station, Lee jumped to her feet, crash-diving the contents of her purse onto the floor. She jammed everything back in and then stood quickly, moving amid the current of people to the outside, and then she was completely disoriented. The city looked familiar, yet something was vaguely wrong. The names on the signs seemed foreign. The air smelled burned.