Into Thin Air (44 page)

“Well,” she said to Lila. “It isn't likely, but judges do favor the mothers.”

“They do?” Lila said. She stood up. The room tilted, and Lila braced one hand along the table.

“Are you all right?” the lawyer said, and Lila nodded.

She paid fifty dollars for the advice.

In the end she confided only to Maureen, who had always been her ally. The two women sat out in Maureen's yard, and Lila would finally break down, crying in her hands, sluicing the tears from her face until the top of her blouse was damp.

“It's just the pull of the past,” Maureen soothed. “And there's nothing to do about it.”

She made Lila come inside. She gave her a cool, clean cloth and ice-cold lemonade and sat with her, rubbing the back of her neck. “Don't you worry,” she told her. “Jim's no fool.”

Maureen, though, had her doubts about that. The whole thing made her furious. She waited until Lila was out of the house one morning to barge over to Jim's. He grinned when he saw her.

“You're making a big mistake,” she told him.

“Oh, yeah? About what?”

“I'm talking about Lee,” Maureen said. “I hear she's back.”

He shifted uneasily. “No one's making any mistake.”

“They had better not,” she said coolly.

He picked up his coffee cup. “Is this your business?” he said.

“Gee, it sure seems like it, doesn't it?” Maureen said, and walked out of his house.

12

Every city had highways. Nights after Jim left, nights when the hotel room seemed more the residence of a runaway than a grown woman, Lee tumbled outside, Jim's leather jacket hugged over her shoulders. The night felt clean and cool, and already stars prickled the sky with light. She began striding, pumping her arms, trying to deepen her breathing into a kind of calm. The cars swerved lazily away from her. She walked so briskly, sweat banded her back, Her palms were clammy and her hair suddenly hurt, as if each strand had a nerve pulsing within it. She pushed on, walking determinedly along the shoulder of the road. She must have walked an hour and a half, but she didn't feel better. The churning in her mind hadn't slowed one single bit. Instead she felt sick and panicky, and for the first time that she could remember, the endless strip of road gave her no pleasure. The highway seemed like nothing more than the highway. She dead-stopped, the night crowding in upon her. Cars whizzed and blurred past her, and she caught a brief smear of song from a car radio, the first trembling bars from a falsely written love song she had never much liked. She stood there, alone and trapped in the hardness of the night, and every direction she looked toward seemed like one where she had already been. She was suddenly shivering and so defeated that it was all she could do not to sink down onto the cold road and not ever move anywhere again.

The walk back seemed to take forever, and by the time she reached the hotel her whole body felt boneless. She trudged up to her silent room, clicking on the TV almost immediately. There was already a movie on, some kind of science-fiction film about a man who did his murdering with the help of a time machine. She drew a bath. Maybe she'd make herself tea on the hot plate. Maybe she'd read some of the book she had bought. She'd take a bath and act as though she had a normal life that anyone might want to live.

As soon as she got into the tub, she felt impatient. She pulled herself out, wrapping a towel about her, wandering back into the main room. Flopping on the bed, she searched for the phone. She started to ring Jim's number, wanting something familiar, then she thought of Lila, lifting up the phone, maybe laughing, saying something to Jim, expecting the voice on the phone to be a friend, or the hospital, or anybody but Lee, Lee hung up.

She picked up the phone again, hesitated, and then dialed Andy. He always picked up the phone. He always said you never knew who might be on the other end. His line rang eighteen times, and as soon as he picked up she hung up. She lay prone on the bed, and then she suddenly felt so alone, it seemed she might disappear if she didn't make contact. Abruptly she dialed again.

“Yes,” he said, his voice edgy.

“Andy,” she said. She had a sudden fleeting image of Andy, driving in the night, a crumpled map beside him. She was a point on paper, a destination circled in red.

“I wanted to let you know I'm okay.”

There was a clip of silence.

“Good,” he said finally. “That's good.”

Static fizzed and popped on the line.

“You want me to ask you where you are?” he said.

“Baltimore,” Lee said.

“You want to tell me why?”

She felt the words moving up in her throat, lodging. And then she heard music, low and soft in the background. Voices threaded together.

“Who's there?” she said.

“Listen, I'm happy to hear from you,” Andy said.

“Who's cooking at the restaurant? You still go?”

“They didn't hire anyone new yet.” He cleared his throat. “I guess you expect I'm going to try to figure out why you left, that I'm going to pry, but I'm not.”

“You can if you want,” Lee said. She put her arms about her body, holding on tight. “Do you want to?”

“Are you coming home?”

“I don't know,” she said. The music in the background seemed to get louder. She heard the clink of glasses.

“Oh.” Something rustled in the background. “Listen,” he said, “I have some people here.”

“Oh,” said Lee. “All right.” People. Was that one, or a couple, or a long, lovely woman who might sit so close beside him they might share the same breath of air? Her throat knotted. She could hear him breathing on the other end. “I'm not lying to you,” she said.

“Everyone says that,” he told her.

“Andy—” She wanted to ask him what he would do if she appeared in his court telling him what she had done, asking custody of her daughter. He had once told her that he believed everyone deserved a fair shake, murderers, petty thieves, even child molesters, but she had been in his courtroom one day when a twenty-year-old drug dealer came in. He had been caught selling speed to sixth-graders. She had seen it herself, how Andy's face had shut down, as if a layer of varnish were solidifying his features. She knew before the dealer opened his mouth, before the lawyer or Andy said one word, that Andy had made his mind up, that the sentence was going to be as tough as he could get away with and still be just.

“I really have to go,” he said, his voice hardening. “I'm telling you so you don't think I'm cutting you off.”

“Okay,” Lee said. She kept the receiver cupped against her ear. She didn't think he'd really hang up. They used to have phone conversations that lasted two hours simply because every time she said her good-bye, he would think of something else he had to tell her.

The click came. The connection broke. Lee kept her stubborn hold on the line. She kept listening, almost as if he were still somehow talking to her, a secret language that any moment would reveal itself to her. She missed him.

She didn't go to a lawyer. One night she turned on the TV in the middle of an advertisement. “Landers and Landers, Attorneys at Law,” the TV intoned. “When a good friend just isn't enough.” The number flashed: 1-800-555-WINN. Lee copied it down. She didn't know about a good friend being enough or not because right now she didn't have one.

She kept the number in the top drawer of her night table. She had an intuitive fear of lawyers. She wasn't sure how to declare yourself alive again, and she worried about how the law could bend, how she could be left without a daughter at all or, worse, somehow punished for having left her in the first place. Jim hadn't called a lawyer, either, and although she wasn't quite sure why, she was grateful and silent about it, and she began to think that maybe she could convince Jim to let her have her daughter some of the time.

Jim never actually came out and said Yes, you can see Joanna, but when Lee showed up at the pharmacy, and on the odd occasion that Joanna was there, he didn't actively stop her, either.

Every day Lee showered and dressed as carefully as if she were going out on a date, making sure everything was pressed and buttoned and tied, brushing her hair as best she could. She walked to the pharmacy and waited for her daughter. It was always a kind of giddy relief to see her.

Joanna always looked at her suspiciously. She was shy, slow to warm. She hung about Jim, watching Lee out of the comer of her eye. Lee always casually brought out a book, something with large colored photographs of the moon or of exotic animals. She held the book at an angle so wherever Joanna was she could be drawn to it.

It sometimes tore Jim up to watch his daughter with Lee. Joanna became feverish. It was almost as if Lee were peeling her, pulling back the stubborn silence, the bunched-up anger, all of it layer by layer, until Joanna reemerged, new and shining. Joanna switched on, scrambling to study the book Lee had. The two of them would bend their heads together and talk excitedly. Joanna had told Jim that Lee didn't call her “smartie-pants” or “braino” the way the kids at school did. Lee didn't encourage her patronizingly the way the teacher did. Lee seemed as excited as she was by the graphs and charts and photographs, as new to Lee as Joanna herself was. And when it was time to go home, both of them looked at Jim with such raw gratitude that he could hardly speak. “I'll be here tomorrow,” Joanna told Lee.

“No, puss,” Jim said. “Remember? Tomorrow your mom's taking you shopping for shoes.”

Joanna blinked at Lee. “Wanna come?” she said.

“Oh, I can't,” Lee said quickly. Joanna kept looking at her. “I have to go to the dentist.”

“The dentist.” Joanna frowned. “I'd cancel.”

Jim gave her a gentle push toward the back. “And I'd go get my coat if I were you, miss. Time to go.”

She slipped off the stool and walked away from them, slow and graceful, turning around once to see if they were still watching her, which, of course, they were.

“I made a big mistake,” Lee said abruptly to Jim.

“She did fine without you,” Jim said.

Lee buttoned her jacket thoughtfully. “I can't bear living in the hotel anymore,” she said.

“When I think of you, I think of hotels,” Jim said.

“Don't think that anymore,” Lee said. “Maybe I should just rent a place for a while. Maybe I should get a job.”

Lee looked beyond him, at Joanna, who was bounding back toward them, carrying her book by the open cover.

“You know what you're doing?” Jim said.

“Maybe for the first time in my life,” Lee said.

Lee went to the Keystone Bank and opened up an account for herself with the money her father had left her, and every morning she got the paper and scouted jobs and apartments. She psyched herself up to like the city. She told herself it wasn't the same place that she had so willingly fled. Every Sunday she cut out the city calendar from the paper and stuck it to her refrigerator with magnets. She tried to tick off the things she might like to do that week. She could go to the museum. There was a waterfront so new and gleaming and rebuilt that she bet she wouldn't recognize it. She repeated to herself like a mantra: Baltimore isn't the worst possible place a person could live. She had once thought you could learn to love a person, and she had been wrong, but maybe you really could learn to love a place, maybe if that love was finite, if it was only for as long as you needed to be there.

She looked for a job. She was positive she could find work as a cook somewhere, but in two weeks' search she found only two positions open, one for an experienced Cajun cook and one for a pastry chef, and she was neither. She walked the streets in her one suit, a navy blue wool with a skirt that was a little too short, a navy silk blouse that had a stain on one sleeve. This is for Joanna, she told herself, sipping in air before she entered yet another strange restaurant. She refused to talk to anyone but the manager. “You should see the soups I make,” she said. “You should see what I do to a piece of fish. Try me out. Two weeks, I guarantee I'll increase your business.”

“Business is busy enough,” one manager told Lee curtly.

In the end she got a job waitressing, with a promise of some cooking. It was just a hole in the wall, a basic continental restaurant called Trax's, where on a busy night she'd be lucky to get weekly carfare in her tips. She didn't care. The place seemed full of customers, and she didn't have to wear any uniform other than her own clean clothes. It could work out. The manager who hired her was a young brisk woman with a spiky punk haircut. Her name was Georgia Ranter, and she told Lee that managing a restaurant wasn't her real life at all. “I'm a drummer for the Sick Potatoes,” she said. “You know that song, ‘Grandma's Syringes'? It played in all the dance clubs? That was us.” She nodded at Lee encouragingly. “So what are you
really
into?”

“I'm a cook,” Lee said.

Georgia was silent. The light left her face, like a dimming candle. “Right,” she said, disappointed. She handed Lee an application. “Fill ‘er up.”

Lee looked at the application. Name. Social Security number. Address. Homing devices, anchoring you to a life.

“What?” Georgia asked Lee, peering over her shoulder.

“Nothing,” Lee said. Her hands felt shaky. It's now or never, her father used to say to her when she couldn't make up her mind. She remembered that the never part always used to scare her, a word as final and lonely as a locked empty room. Her heart hammered, but she picked up the pen and wrote carefully: Lee Archer. 053-46-9855. Oh, God, she thought. Her face was flushed, and for a moment she was afraid to look up at Georgia.

“That wasn't so terrible, was it?” Georgia said, taking the form from Lee's startled fingers.

It wasn't so terrible, but it was strange. And as soon as the paper left Lee's hand, she felt something change. Everything suddenly seemed inevitable, speeding forward. She was starting work in just two days, and then the very first realtor she contacted took one look at Lee and announced she had the perfect apartment for her. “Come on, let's go take a look right now,” the woman said. “If you like it, you can move in tomorrow.” She wasn't much older than Lee, but already her hair was white, and she kept frisking one hand through it.