Into Thin Air (43 page)

“You go to a nice school,” he said, but Joanna pressed her face to the window, straining wistfully around to see the kids streaming into a sunny courtyard.

He parked the car in back of the store. Joanna straggled into the pharmacy, and as soon as he was in the door he saw Lee, sitting on a stool, and as soon as she saw Joanna she bolted off her stool and began smoothing down her dress, straightening her hair.

“Hello,” she said. Joanna looked up, cautious.

Jim tried to orchestrate, to make things seem casual, almost normal. “Well, want to read in the back?”

“My name is Lee,” Lee said suddenly.

“Joanna.”

“I know,” Lee said.

“You do? How?”

Jim put one hand on Lee's shoulder.

“Magic,” Lee said.

He could see a line at the pharmacy, too much for the assistant to handle. He looked toward the counter again. “I'll watch her,” Lee said. “We'll stay right here.” She touched his arm. “Right in sight. It's okay.” She pressed at his shoulder. “Please. We won't talk about anything but the weather.”

He hesitated. “Can you read?” Joanna said to Lee.

“All right,” he said.

It was nearly impossible to concentrate. He spent half the time watching them. Lee and Joanna were both at the ice-cream counter, poring over one of Joanna's books. The two of them ignored him. He kept expecting something sudden to happen. Lee bolting out with Joanna, Lila walking in, off her shift early, thinking to surprise her husband and daughter. He miscounted theophylline tablets and had to start again. He heard a customer's question about over-the-counter cough syrup and found himself handing her a bottle of Maalox.

He couldn't wait for closing time. Usually he liked to linger a little, straighten up, survey what he considered his kingdom. Tonight, though, he rushed through the last bits of paperwork. He locked up the restricted drugs so clumsily that any addict could have had them.

“Well,” he said, approaching Lee and Joanna, “ready to go, pumpkin-head?”

“Can Lee come to dinner?” Joanna said. Flushed, she turned to Lee. “We're having spaghetti and cake,” she promised. “
Chocolate
cake.”

“Not tonight, honey,” he said.

Joanna looked up at Lee. “Another time,” Joanna said with a queenly air.

“Another time soon,” Lee said.

He had just gone into the shower, just for a minute, and when he came out Joanna was telling Lila about Lee. “She knew the books I know,” Joanna said. “I wish I had hair like hers.”

Lila looked as if she had been struck. She seemed to lengthen along the refrigerator, bracing against it as if for balance. “Who's Lee?” she said haltingly.

“She's just a lady who was in the pharmacy.”

Jim put one hand on Lila's shoulder.

“I liked her,” Joanna said.

In bed, they talked. “What are we going to do?” Lila said.

“We're going to have to tell her,” Jim said.

Lila sat up, bunching the covers about her. “You think it's good for a kid to know her mother walked out the day she was born? You think that's a pretty thing to hear?”

“No, I don't think that's good,” Jim said. “But it's the truth.”

“And what if she leaves?” Lila said. She lowered herself back down against the pillows. “What if she wants Joanna?”

“I won't let her take Joanna,” Jim said.

“Can't we wait to tell her, let her be a kid a little longer?” She looped her arms about Jim.

“All right,” he said. “For a little longer.”

Jim hated himself, but every time he began his drive home, he ended up going to Lee's hotel. The road suddenly switched right when he was driving on it. His hands on the wheel swerved left instinctively. Seeing her hotel, he thought he might as well go in, might as well try to convince her to leave, convince her to let them all alone. And then, for a moment, sitting in the car, the motor idling, he imagined her disappearing again, as seamlessly as she had at first. He'd start panicking. He'd rush inside, his resolve wavering. She looked fresh and lovely; she was always happy to see him.

One night she made him soup on her hot plate. He took the bowl and tasted it. “Whose is this?” he said. “This is delicious.”

“It's mine,” she said, laughing. “I cook now.”

“You?” He remembered half-frozen TV dinners because Lee hadn't turned the stove up high enough, peas served in the water they were boiled in. “How did this happen?”

“Lots of things happened you don't know about,” she said.

“You live alone in Madison?”

She nodded.

“No gentlemen callers?” He fumbled a grin.

“One,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed.

“Still?”

“I don't know.”

He sipped the soup, studying her. “I feel like I'm supposed to say ‘Now you know what it feels like, being left.'”

“I know what it feels like,” she said. Andy flashed in her mind, and she felt suddenly undone. She looked up at Jim's sad, serious face. “I made a mess of things, didn't I?”

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“I don't know,” Lee said.

“What does that mean, ‘I don't know'?” Jim's stomach churned inside of him. He put down the soup and stared at it. There was something green and flaky dusting the top, making a swirling pattern. “Are you staying or leaving?” He felt suddenly sick. “Do you have a lawyer, Lee?”

Startled, she put down her own soup mug. “No,” she said. “Do you?”

He picked at the chenille spread on her bed. “What happened to us, Lee?” he said suddenly. “Sometimes, when I was looking for you so hard, I used to rack my brains trying to think of the one thing to say that might bring you back. I don't know what I would have done if I had actually found you, what I would have said. I just kept thinking of us at home, happy.”

“I used to worry that you'd find me,” Lee said slowly. “Every time I saw a blond head, I'd freeze.” She frowned. “You just wanted so much. But there was nothing there that I could give you.”

“Oh, yes, there was,” he said.

He looked at Lee's phone. He suddenly wanted to call Lila, wanting to hear her voice, speeding across the wires to him, reconnecting.

“What do you want with Joanna?” he said.

“She's my daughter,” Lee said. She washed one hand over her face. “It's not too late for us to know each other, is it?”

“She knows her mother.”

“She has to know!” she cried. “What if I went to a lawyer? What if I wanted some kind of custody?”

“Custody,” Jim said, suddenly angry. “What are you talking about, custody? You can be put in jail. That's what you can do.”

Lee took his empty soup bowl and brought it into the bathroom sink. He heard the rush of water, and when she came out her eyes looked red. “You think I'm not in jail now?” she said quietly.

Lila couldn't relax until Joanna was home. She didn't want to tell her own daughter to shut up, but it was difficult hearing her talk about Lee. It was worse when Jim began to be late. It didn't take that long to close up the pharmacy. There were no emergencies he needed to stay open to handle, no problems with closing up. He had always joked with her that she was lucky she was marrying a pharmacist and not a doctor. He had clientele, not patients, and they never called at one in the morning because they couldn't breathe. He blamed his lateness on the buses, or sometimes he said he had to talk to the assistant about some matter or other. And once he told her he had been to dinner with Lee. He said it so matter-of-factly that it stunned her. “I need to find out what she's planning to do,” he said.

Lila rubbed her hand through her hair. It felt suddenly flat in her hand, vaguely greasy and boring, “She's a criminal,” Lila said.

“I just need to get things straight,” he told her.

She tried to be busy, to carry on her life as if she didn't care. She pretended she didn't see him looking at an old photo of Lee or studying her with such pain that she had to go into the kitchen and busy herself so she wouldn't cry. When he didn't touch her in bed, she pretended he was just tired. And when he did reach for her, with a touch that felt almost desperate to her, she pretended there wasn't another woman right there in bed with them, rolling in between them as easily as air. When he came in the house she was watching a movie on the TV or so engrossed in a book that she wouldn't rise up to meet him. “Hey,” he said, bending to kiss her. She always held her breath. She didn't want to smell Lee.

One night he came home at three. She was sitting on the chintz chair by the light, a magazine in her lap, her face drawn, and as soon as she saw him she felt a swoon of nausea loosening her pride.

He stood by the door. “I would have called, but I was arguing.” He looked exhausted.

“Why can't you get a lawyer to argue?” Lila said.

“You want Joanna in court? You want lawyers?”

“Are you going to leave me?” she said. She was instantly ashamed.

He sat on the edge of her chair. He lifted up a ribbon of her hair. “Come on. Don't be silly.”

“Are you?” she said, “Are you still in love with Lee?”

“No,” he said. “And I'm not going to leave you.”

Lila tried to tell herself that things would work out. She was married to Jim. He loved her. She tried to imagine herself in Jim's position and decided she could never forgive someone who had disappeared like that. Second chances were for the movies. It didn't make her feel any better.

She tried to lose herself in work, but everything seemed to remind her of what she might be losing. She walked into a patient's room, a twenty-five-year-old woman getting her nose done, to find a man nuzzling in the bed with her. She spotted a man wandering the halls, his coat bundled in his arms. She wouldn't have even noticed him except he was humming the same lullaby she sang to Joanna at night. The man seemed to walk faster, and when he whipped about a corner she saw a small blue bootie.

The pay phones reminded her that Lee could be calling Jim. The terrible hospital food jarred an image of Lee eating lunch in a hotel room or, worse, dining with Jim. Get hold of yourself, Lila's mother used to warn her, but Lila couldn't seem to find a grip. She kept trying to recall herself back when she had felt in control, back when she had been simply Lila, a woman in love with a profession and not a person, a woman whose worst dreams didn't earthquake into reality. She wanted to go back in time, before she had ever stood poised at the threshold of Jim's room, half in the harsh hospital bright, half in the soothing dark.

Lila didn't know whom to turn to for advice. She didn't want anyone at work to know, and when she called home, weeping, her mother told her to smarten up, to go out and get herself the best lawyer in town. “I'll pay for it,” she told Lila.

“It hasn't come to that stage yet,” Lila said.

“Oh, please,” her mother said. “That's what they all say.”

Lila's father was no better. Slowly, deliberately, he told her to go out and buy a backless dress. “A dress?” Lila said, mystified. “Yeah, and wear heels,” her father said. “Bright red, as high as you can walk on them.” He advised her to throw dinner parties, to serve the kinds of foods men liked. “Men foods?” Lila said, baffled. “What are men foods?”

“You know,” her father said, talking to her as patiently as if she were five years old. “No fancy icings. Those crescent cookies. The kind your mother makes. You listen to her, she'll give you the recipe.”

Her mother, on the other line, sighed. “Get a lawyer, honey,” she said.

Lila didn't get a lawyer. She walked around with emotion surging inside of her, struggling to keep her shell cool and efficient and intact.

Every time she looked at Joanna, the child seemed to be dimming right in front of her. She reached for the hand Joanna tugged away. She kept touching Joanna's hair, her smooth skin, the hem of whatever dress she had on, and everything she touched felt somehow different. It chilled her. She began coming to school early so she could whisk Joanna away before Lee had a chance to see her.

She thought up reasons why Joanna couldn't go to the pharmacy to see Jim. She kept remembering a spate of newspaper stories and magazine articles all about women taking kids into this kind of underground railroad, never to be found again. These kids were raised in trailer parks or high rises, in ranches so far west they weren't even on any map you might find. All Lee would need was a fast car and a box of hair dye and scissors for Joanna. Lila began checking up on Joanna, calling the school so many times that Joanna's teacher finally requested that Lila come in for a conference if she had such doubts about the school.

“No, no, it isn't that,” Lila said. “I'm just a worrier.”

Still, Lila couldn't help it. She found excuses to call, excuses to take a break and drive like a maniac down to the school just so she could make sure Joanna was all right and that Lee wasn't there. She saw Joanna's panicked face when she drove up, she saw the other children giggle. And when Joanna came home, she wouldn't talk to Lila.

Her thinking began to change. She sometimes imagined herself taking Joanna into hiding herself. She'd have to make up a story. She'd have to say she was the mother. She believed that was true. She had been such a fool. She had never even thought to press Jim about adopting Joanna.

She ended up walking into a legal aid clinic two cities away from her own. She was still in her nurse's uniform, so she kept her blue raincoat buttoned to her throat. She gave them a fake name and began asking questions. Could a mother who had abandoned her child reclaim her? The lawyer who was listening looked younger than Lila. She had long black hair clamped back with silver, but she wore an expensive dark suit and polished high-heeled shoes.