Into Thin Air (45 page)

“We can walk to it,” she said.

“Tomorrow—” Lee felt slightly dazed.

The apartment was filled with light and windows and polished wood floors that echoed as they walked across them. There was one big bedroom and a small side room that might be perfect for a small girl. Lee wandered through, following the realtor, listening to her spiel about moldings and character and extra closets, the same speech she had heard Frank give so many times that she could have recited it by heart herself. She turned from the realtor, who was gesturing at the baseboards, and in the hazy dusty light sprinkling in from the kitchen window, Lee thought, for just a moment, she saw her father.

“Look at the size of that closet!” the realtor said.

Lee blinked. The light sifted and settled and was just light again. “I'll take it,” she said.

She bought a couch and a table and chairs and a bed small enough so a little girl wouldn't feel lost in it. She ran to the corner store and bought two cans of pink paint so pale it might seem like a wash on the wall. She wrapped her hair up and put on the transistor radio she had carried with her all the way from her Atlanta days, a radio that still worked, and that tiny back room was the room she painted first.

She put a vase of flowers in the pink room. Every day before she went to work, she dusted the room. Every night when she came into the house, she imagined what it might be like to have a child in it, if only for a little while.

She was always flushed when she came into the pharmacy. “You should see the chairs I found,” she told Jim.

“Chairs!” he said, amazed. “The whole time we lived together, you never even wanted to buy a set of cups that matched. We never would have even had wastebaskets if I hadn't gone out and bought them myself.”

“Well, things are different now,” Lee said.

He didn't know if he believed her. Every time she pulled something out of her purse, he half expected to see a train schedule, a set of tickets.

“Come and see,” Lee begged him. “You and Joanna.”

“I don't know,” Jim said.

“What could a visit hurt?” Lee said. “Think of it as supervised visitation. An hour.”

“I don't think so.”

“Aren't you curious to see the chairs?” Lee said, smiling. “I even have a set of silverware, Jim, a whole set.”

“Look, I don't know.”

“Come on, Jim. A half hour,”

He dug his hands into his pockets. “I must be out of my bloody mind,” he said.

“It was the chairs that did it, wasn't it,” Lee said.

He'd never tell her, but it really was the chairs. He could imagine her living a life on the road, in hotel rooms or cheap sublets cluttered with somebody else's furniture. He could imagine her in any kind of transient life without him in it, but if he thought of her in a home, in a place that made sense, he thought of her in his past, with him.

So the next afternoon, on his lunch hour, he and Joanna walked over to Lee's for lunch. She didn't live in such a bad neighborhood, and the apartment building looked fairly well kept up. Still, when he saw her name on the buzzer, he flinched. “I want to press it,” Joanna said, stabbing a finger on the bell.

Lee met them both at the door, jittery with nerves, in a clean white shirt and blue jeans and sneakers. “I was afraid you'd change your mind,” she said.

He led Joanna in, He didn't expect the wood floors Lee had buffed and polished herself, rubbing so strenuously that she had worn through the knees of her jeans. He was surprised by the clean white walls Lee had painted, the single framed print above a black couch. The place was clean and bright and inviting. The kitchen table had a fruit-printed cloth on it and a blue plate of cupcakes.

“Go on,” Lee said, grinning at him. “You're dying to see if I really do have a set of dishes that match.”

“I am not,” he said, but he walked to the cupboards. Inside, neatly stacked, were dinner and salad plates, some soup bowls and cups, all in the same deep blue. On the stove was a heavy cast-iron set of cookware. Amazed, he turned to her. “What have you become?” he said.

Joanna was hunched over the table, eyeing the chocolate cupcakes Lee had made. “You can have as many as you want,” Lee told her.

“Can I have five?” Joanna said.

“As many as you want is two,” Jim said.

Lee showed them the rest of the apartment, leading to the pink room, watching Joanna as she stepped inside. “Whose room is this?” Joanna said.

“You like it?” Lee asked her, and Joanna, mouth full of cupcake, nodded.

“It's a guest room,” Jim said.

“Sort of,” Lee said.

Joanna sat on the small pink bed, looking around, getting so comfortable that Jim suddenly straightened. “We'd better get back,” he said. “Come on, peach.”

Lee walked them both to the door. She waited until Joanna had bounded outside before she touched Jim's sleeve.

“Thank you,” Lee said.

He stepped back. “It's not for you,” he told her. “I just don't want to have to ever tell her that I refused to let her know her mother.”

Lee looked at him. “Can she ever visit by herself?”

Jim looked past her, into her apartment. “Are you going to try to take her?” he said.

Flustered, Lee dug her hands into her pockets. “What a way to say it,” she said. “
Take
her. You think I'd force her to be with me if she didn't want to?”

“I wouldn't try.”

“I just want her to know who I am,” Lee said.

“I thought you were going to wait on that.”

“So I changed my mind,” she said, suddenly miserable. “What do I have to do to show you I'm serious? I rented this place. I work a job. I'm
here
, for God's sake. Why can't I be a part of her life? How long are we going to fight about this? What's best for her—what's best for us…. Listen, she's going to have to know sometime. She
knows
me already. She
likes
me. You can see that. And when she's older, you think she'll forgive either one of us for not telling her?”

Jim had a fleeting image of Joanna at nineteen, angrily slamming out of the house.

“If you don't tell her, I will.”

“No,” he said. “Don't do that.” He looked over at Joanna, who was polishing off another cupcake, littering the sidewalk with crumbs. When she saw them watching her, she started walking firmly away.

“‘Bye, Lee!” she called. “‘Bye, Daddy! ‘Bye, everybody in the whole wide world!”

“I'll tell her,” Jim said, “But let me tell her alone.”

They went for a ride. To get ice cream, Jim said. They all rode on the front seat, Joanna between him and Lila, Lila vaguely tapping out some rhythm on her knee.

Jim pulled into the first Dairy Queen he saw, buying them all scoops in a cup. “You know what?” he said. “I think we should eat these by this really pretty wooded road I know.”

Joanna blinked. “How come?” she said.

“A pretty view helps digestion,” Lila said, taking her dish of vanilla.

“I'm eating mine now,” Joanna said, but she twirled her white plastic spoon around once and then looked across Lila at the road.

It took him only ten minutes to drive to the road and park, but it seemed to take him a hundred more to get up the nerve to tell Joanna. He took slow, tasteless bites of his own chocolate ice cream. “Isn't this pretty?” he said, watching Joanna, who was taking careful licks of ice cream; Lila, who nibbled uncomfortably. They ate in silence, and when Joanna had almost finished he turned to her.

“Joanna,” he said suddenly. “Do you remember all the photographs I showed you of your mother?”

Joanna nodded.

“Remember I told you that she had had to go away, that she was coming back?”

“And then she died,” said Joanna.

Jim felt a flicker of pain. “Well, no,” he said. “That's what we thought. When a person isn't heard from or seen in a very long time, they're considered dead.” Joanna stopped eating. She looked at Lila. Lila carefully napkined off the wet dot of ice cream on Joanna's nose.

“You go on with your life. That's why I married Lila. I love her. And she loves you.” He nodded at Joanna encouragingly.

“More than anything,” Lila said.

“What's wrong?” Joanna said suddenly. “Why are you both looking at me like that? Don't you feel good?”

“Honey,” he said. His voice seemed to be drying even as he spoke, cracking into dust. “Your mother didn't die.”

“She's alive?”

A knot lodged in his throat. Jim said, “I spent years trying to find her, and now she's found us.”

Joanna stared. “Found us? My mother's here?”

Jim nodded. Lila looked at him above Joanna's head, her eyes swimming.

“Where is she?”

“Well,” he said, “well, Lee's your mother, honey.”

Joanna was silent for a moment. “I don't believe you,” she said.

“You see how she loves you, how she comes to see you.”

“I still don't believe you. She
likes
me, but she doesn't love me. And anyway, she never said she was my mother. Did she tell you that?” Joanna asked Lila.

“Well, honey, she told your father.”

“We thought it would be better if we told you.”

Joanna bit down on her lower lip. “Why didn't she ever find me before? What took her so long?”

Jim stroked her hair. “She was having a hard time.”

“What hard time?”

“Honey, sometimes life is really hard for people,” Jim said.

“But she knew I was alive, right? She knew where we were.” Joanna looked at Jim.

“I don't know. I just know she found us now.”

“Was she still away on business?” Joanna said. “All that time? You couldn't find her through her business?”

“Baby,” Jim said.

Joanna looked down at her ice cream. “I can't finish this,” she said abruptly. He took the dripping dish from her and pitched it into the garbage bag he kept in the car.

“Don't you want to talk a little about it?” Lila said.

She shook her head. For a moment she remembered how, when she was really little, she had played dolls with her mother's photographs. No one had ever asked her where her mother was; everyone had assumed that was now Lila, including her. “What happens now?” she said. She thought of Amy Mandoza in her class—Amy, who had two sets of parents, who spent Christmas in Aspen with her mother and stepfather and the rest of the year here with her father and her stepmother. Amy hated Aspen, She came back one time with a broken leg because her stepfather had insisted a big girl like her didn't need to baby around the bunny slope any longer. “Do I have to go live with her sometimes?” she said.

“Things don't have to change one single bit,” Jim said. “You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to know how very much Lila and I love you.”

He waited for her to say something, but she was frowning. She stared down into her lap.

He drove her home in silence, and only when they walked into the house did he see how red her eyes still were. Lila looked at Jim with a little flicker of alarm. He shook his head. “Wash up for bed now,” he said to Joanna. He watched her walk on her coltish legs, clapping her hands for the dog, and then he turned to Lila.

Lila folded down onto the couch. She picked at the tufts of fabric on the arms, staring down at the rug, not looking at him, until he couldn't stand it any longer. He had to go and crouch down beside her.

“You think we did wrong?” he said.

She continued to study the carpet. “I hate Lee,” she said.

Joanna wouldn't talk. No matter how gently Lila or Jim brought up the subject of Lee, Joanna tuned them out so expertly it sometimes took them minutes to realize she wasn't listening, she was in the zone.

She didn't ask about Lee, and she refused to go to the pharmacy. The only person she trusted was the dog, and even he sometimes bolted from her to chase squirrels or to flirt with the neighbor's toy poodle. She spent two hours one Saturday looking for the photograph albums of herself as a baby. There were a million shots. She was lying in a drizzle of sunlight. She was rocking on a chair. There were pictures of her with Jim and with Maureen and Lila. There were shots of her as a newborn, but there wasn't one single shot of her with Lee. She piled the pictures back into the album pages and shut it, stuffing it into the bottom of the closet.

She kept thinking about her mother. At school, during recess, when the other girls were walking around and around the small oval playground excitedly whispering confidences, Joanna walked alone, imagining her mother leaving her. She had never really thought of it before. She had always imagined her mother had been away on business like Beth Kitany's mother, who traveled to Europe, but why would someone go away from a baby that little? Had she been such an ugly baby that her mother couldn't possibly want her? Had she hurt Lee so much being born that Lee couldn't stand to look at her?

In class she was distracted. More than once the teacher reminded her to put on her thinking cap. She lay in bed at night and every single thing she used to think about her mother felt just like a slap in the face. Her mother hadn't had to go someplace on business, someplace so exotic she hadn't been able to write or call or remember her family. She had chosen to leave. Her mother hadn't died. She had been a plane ride away, and she hadn't thought to call her own daughter. Until now, and Joanna didn't even know why. Maybe she was dying and trying to kiss up to God. Joanna drew the bedclothes up to her chin. Which was worse, she thought, to finally see your mother after all these years and find out she was dying or not to ever see her at all?

She bolted out of bed, padding barefoot into Jim and Lila's bedroom. She shook him. Bleary-eyed, he struggled up. “What is it?” he said, alarmed. Beside him Lila stirred.