Into Thin Air (48 page)

He stared at her as if he suddenly didn't know her. “What should you do?” he said. “I can't believe you. What should you do—you should stay away from us for a while.”

“Stay away? You think she ran away because of me?”

Jim was silent for a minute. “She ran away because of the situation.”

“I can't stay away. Not now,” Lee said.

“I
want you to stay away.”

Lee shook her head. “No,” she said. “You don't.”

He looked at her as if she were already very far away. “I love my daughter. I love Lila. It took me a very long time to love my life again. And now you come back and you make me remember you all over again. And things that had stopped hurting years ago—all of a sudden, they hurt again.”

“I never wanted that,” Lee said. “I wanted to make peace—I wanted—”

“You can't do that!” Jim said, astonished. “What do you want from any of us?” He suddenly straightened. “Please,” he said. “Stay away for a while.” He opened the front door, the door that Lee herself had stormed out of countless clear nights to walk and walk and follow the highway, the door Lee had once had the key to, only this time he was the one closing the door. She was the one standing helplessly out in the night, feeling as if she were searching for something that wouldn't ever be found.

Almost immediately Joanna came down with bronchitis. She was out of school for two weeks. Every day Lila tended her own wounds by doing nothing more than tending Joanna's. She gave her sponge baths with imported perfumed soaps. She was no cook, but she made her daughter soup from scratch, painstakingly following recipes she clipped from the papers. She put two kinds of antibiotics in bright paper cups. She disguised the cough syrups in shakes she made in the blender. She filled the bathroom with steam and brought Joanna into it. “Breathe deep,” she said. “It'll clear your lungs.” She fixed up the bathroom with big white towels and a pitcher of clear lemonade, and she sat in there with Joanna. She could hardly breathe in there herself, but she stayed so through the steam Joanna might see her.

She didn't think about why Joanna had run away that night or why she had come back. She was simply grateful that she had. Jim couldn't stop looking at Joanna. And, too, Lila felt him looking at her. He called her ten times a day. He came home every afternoon to have lunch with the two of them. Sometimes they all napped together, too, and he would wrap Lila up in his arms, holding her as tightly and as gratefully as he held Joanna. He was home every evening, with flowers for her, with toys for Joanna, even once a rubber bone for the dog, who was ridiculously pleased.

Jim thought about Lila all the time now. He was working late at the pharmacy when he suddenly missed Lila so much, he had to see her. He drove to the hospital, asking the nurses where she was. He found her in the cafeteria, sipping coffee, and when she saw him her face bloomed into a smile. “Hey,” he said, taking her hand.

“Hey yourself,” she said.

“You know what?” he said.

She shrugged, happy.

“Will you marry me?”

“You? I'd have to be crazy.”

“No, I mean again. A big wedding, flowers, honeymoon.”

She was silent for a moment. “Lee's not coming, is she?”

“Not this time,” he said, and kissed her until she smiled again.

A week later Joanna went back to school, and for the first time in his life Jim was glad his daughter had the zone. It protected her. She came home and stared dreamily out the windows, and he didn't disturb her because she seemed so content. When Lila came to get her at school. Joanna would be sitting contentedly on the ground, oblivious of everything, and sometimes Lila would have to honk the horn.

Joanna herself didn't realize how deeply she had been in the zone until she came out of it, suddenly, abruptly, right in the middle of arithmetic. Suddenly she noticed everything was different. There was a new boy in the class who was French, and everyone was trying to mimic his accent. She had been so nonreactive in the zone that teasing her had become boring. Even the wildest of the kids gave up because Joanna no longer showed any emotion, even when you threw a spitball at her.

It was nearing the end of the year. She was behind in long division, but when she went to the board and floundered not one single person laughed, not even when the teacher got exasperated and told her she wasn't trying, instead when Joanna sat back down, Rosamund Phillips, who used to shoot spitballs at her, felt sorry and twisted around and showed Joanna how to do the problem. And later, during reading, no one groaned when she stood up and announced that the book she had read was
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens. On the playground, while the girls formed groups and walked around and around or jumped rope, while the boys played punch ball, they seemed to have tired of jumping on Joanna. No one knew anything had gone on with her other than a lengthy flu. No one asked how she was feeling, but no one asked her anything different from what they might ask anyone else. She walked around by herself, and when she got down and drew a clumsy hopscotch, she was startled that two other girls joined her.

Lee thought about Joanna, but she didn't try to see her. She slept in Joanna's bed, flooded with dreams about Wisconsin and a smaller, younger child than Joanna, a dark-haired scrubby child who had a temperament so rough she might as well have been Lee's daughter.

Lee seemed to swim up toward consciousness, shocked at the suddenness of morning and light. On automatic, she then rushed herself awake. The pink walls were smudged by her handprints as she pulled herself along toward the shower. The wood floor was starting to mottle from the way she dripped from the shower to the kitchen.

She was late to work, and another waitress was already gloomily taking an order from one of Lee's tables. Lee didn't feel the clothes on her body. She barely stepped on the ground. The air brushed past. I was supposed to come alive again here, she thought, so how come I feel so dead?

She didn't go back to the pharmacy, but she wasn't going to leave, either, no matter what Jim said. She walked a lot around the city, toward all the places where she thought Joanna might be: roller rinks, bowling alleys, malls. Once she walked past Jim's house at night, silently standing for a moment in front of it until she felt like a prowler.

At home she sat in the pink room and tried to think about what to do, and then after a while, restless, she'd go into the kitchen and bake bread. She experimented with different flours, with different rising times and yeasts, and she spent a lot of time punching down the dough, forcing her fist into it. She set the dough in a large new blue bowl. The pink room had the best radiators, the kind of strong heat she thought a child could use, so she let her bread dough rise in there. She sat and read until she could finish with the bread.

She was sleeping in the pink room one day, and when she woke up she suddenly felt a scent sharp in her nose. It wasn't the warm sleepy smell of a daughter. It was wheat or cinnamon raisin. It was sourdough. She woke up, sniffing, wanting toast, and she got up and prowled toward the kitchen. It was such a simple thing to ask for, and such an easy thing to get for herself, that for the first time in a long while, she felt comforted.

Without Jim, without Joanna, her days were numbing. She didn't really have friends at the diner. Most of the waitresses were busy hustling for their tips, and most were students, as different from Lee as if she had come from Mars. She tried sometimes to meet people in movie lines or at the supermarket, but they just gave her odd stares. When Friday came around she began to get a feeling in the pit of her stomach. Two days were suddenly too long to get through alone. She once blurted out an invitation to a waiter she kind of liked. “Would you like to see a movie?”

He grinned at her. “Can my girlfriend come, too?” he said. When she blushed he laughed it off. “Hey, I'm flattered,” he told her. Lee didn't tell him that she was so tired of going solo that even a threesome would suit her.

“Hey, you need me this weekend, I can be here,” she told Georgia.

“Jesus, get a life,” Georgia said.

One night Lee simply began dialing. First Jim, who didn't pick up the phone. Then Andy, whose machine clicked on, but at least he didn't have a “we” on his tape, at least he was still living alone. She called California Information for Valerie, all the time thinking of how when she had first met Valerie, Valerie would ask her to movies, to dinner, and she had refused to go. “It's unlisted,” the operator told Lee politely.

Lee dialed. She called Madison weather and listened to the recording warn of an impending heat wave. She called Madison time. She tried to get Valerie's number one more time, and then, half-asleep, something flickered across her memory. When she was a little girl Claire had once told her that mothers had a special kind of telepathy. “If you're ever in trouble, why, I'll know it,” Claire had told her. She had told her lots of things. Dreams could be prophetic. The right one would come along and she would know it. You could whisper to the dead at night and they would hear. Lee sank onto the bed, crossing her arms over her head. Claire had been wrong. She blinked up at the ceiling. “Karen,” she whispered. Nothing happened. Nothing moved in the room, there was no sudden chill wind. She got up and called the recording for Madison weather, and then, abruptly, she called the restaurant in Madison, she called Rico.

“Lee,” Rico said, his voice warming with surprise. “We all miss you.”

“You do?” she said, startled. “So you haven't hired another new cook?”

“Why would I do that?” he said.

“Good,” Lee said, pleased. “That's good.” She sighed.

“You're not leaving us permanently, are you?” he said.

“Why, you'd hire me again?” Lee said.

“Are you kidding? I still remember your blueberry soup,” he said. “Come on, what're you doing out there, a Madison girl like you. Come home.”

When she hung up the phone she suddenly thought of the blueberry soup. She could smell the sweet cream in it. She could feel the restaurant's heavy wood stirring spoon. Her hands flexed, expectant, and closed on the surprise of air.

Lee hadn't seen Joanna in over a month. She went to work and went to movies and cooked at home and told herself that for now that was a life, that any minute things would change. It worked until one afternoon when a mother came into the restaurant with her daughter, the two of them dressed alike and laughing, and then something in Lee snapped. She couldn't wait any longer. She couldn't be patient. “I don't feel well,” she told Georgia. “I gotta go home.” Georgia frowned at Lee for a moment and then saw the expression on her face. “Go,” she said, waving one hand.

Lee half ran to Joanna's school. It was just noon. Kids would be out on the playground, one class after the other. If she timed it right, she could see her daughter.

By the time she reached the school, the playground was emptying of kids. Little kids, kindergarten it looked like. Twin lines. Panting, her hair pasted to her forehead, Lee hooked her fingers into the dirty wire rungs of the fencing, when suddenly another group of kids came out, and there, tagging at the end, was Joanna. Lee pushed against the fencing. Kids were whirling and speeding, breaking up into groups, but Joanna was walking around aimlessly, her hands buried in the pockets of her dress. Look up, Lee thought. Look up. Joanna arched her neck, squinting, lifting her gaze gradually across the horizon and then to Lee. Lee hesitantly lifted one trembling hand. Joanna froze. For a split second she seemed to be wavering in place, the air seemed to be warming around Lee, and then, suddenly, Joanna bolted away, skidding past a jump-rope game, nearly knocking into one of the jumpers.

“Joanna!” Lee cried, but Joanna was running from her, right to the other side of the school, and now a teacher standing at the far end of the playground noticed Lee and began striding toward her. Lee abruptly peeled herself from the wire fence. “Miss!” the teacher called, waving her long arms angrily, but Lee broke into a run.

She ran for nearly six blocks, her pocketbook swinging wildly, her hair whipped back. She ran and ran, thinking of nothing but the sound of her own breath, until she stumbled on a pebble and pitched forward onto the pavement, tearing a hole in her stockings and skinning both knees red. Exhausted, out of breath, she slowly got to her feet and began to walk, ignoring the glances of the people she passed. The whole way home she replayed Joanna racing from her. She went into her apartment, and suddenly the polished floors looked old and musty to her, suddenly even the kitchen seemed small and uninviting. She had no one to call, no one to give comfort, so she sat in her living room, coiled tight as a spring and waiting, and when the phone rang she picked it up automatically.

“You know how upset she is?” Jim said. “Can't you just let things be for a while?”

“Jim,” Lee said.

“No, that's all I'm going to say,” he said, and hung up.

Let things be, she thought. But things were neither here nor there. She was settled nowhere. She belonged to no one. She felt herself suddenly chipping apart.

She waited a week, and then another. She roamed restlessly through Baltimore, always thinking she might see Joanna, things might progress, but although the streets were filled with children she never once saw her daughter.

One day she was waiting on a man and his daughter in the restaurant, and she suddenly smiled at the girl's red sweater. “You know, my daughter loves red, too,” she said.

“Isn't that nice!” the man said, and later when she cleared his table she found a ten-dollar tip.

Her daughter began to be a story she found herself telling people. “She's smart as a whip,” Lee told one customer. “Oh, you should see how well she does in school!” Lee said. “Really?” the woman said. “What school does she go to? My niece has that wonderful Mrs. Sands at the Whittamore.” Lee knew the school, but she realized she had no idea who her daughter's teacher was. The woman was rattling about SRA and learning centers and Lee suddenly felt frightened because she didn't know those things, either, things any mother would know about her child. She picked up the woman's bill, folding it around the money, and then whisked up the woman's half-empty glass of iced tea. “I'll just get you a refill,” she said. “On the house.”