Into Thin Air (16 page)

“We want to see our granddaughter,” Jack said. “The police told us we were grandparents. I guess you were too busy to call your own parents.”

“Dad—” he said, “I
called
,” and his father sighed.

“I know,” Jack said. “And believe me, I'm sorry.”

Gladys was suddenly on the extension, her voice faded. “Baby,” she cried. “What do you need?”

When he started crying, tears across the wires, she made low, soothing sounds in her throat. She waited until he had calmed. “It'll all be all right,” she said. “You just listen to me. We're here if you need us. You need money, you need a place to stay, you need one stupid thing, you call us. I don't care what time it is. I don't. And anyway we're coming out there. As soon as I get off the line, I'm calling the airlines. You can't go through this alone. Listen to me, Lee will be fine. They'll find her.” She started to cry. “What does my granddaughter look like?” she said suddenly. “Is she pretty? Does she have blue eyes? They do when they're that young, you know.”

She stopped crying for a moment. “She looks like you,” Jim said.

He waited for his parents, who couldn't get a flight until the next evening. He kept the radio on, listening to the latest about himself. He bought three newspapers, hoping for news no one was really telling him. He hadn't made any real friends here, mostly because of Lee and studying and school, and he did his best to avoid the neighbors, but even so he saw how they looked at him when he walked out of the house. He stopped at the police station to see what they were doing to find his wife and then he went to see his daughter.

Most of the nurses were now a little suspicious of him, but he wasn't so sure he trusted them, either. Any one of them could have been jealous enough to harm Lee. Any one might have accidentally given Lee the wrong medication and then, horrified, tried to cover it up. He stood with the other fathers in front of the glass and hated the nurses because they had more of a right to his baby than he did. It was dangerous. Babies bonded. He didn't want his baby growing up yearning for the scent of hospital antiseptic, falling in love with the color white, forever straining toward the insidious whisper of crepe shoes on linoleum. He watched the couples holding hands, and it made him feel as if his heart were atrophying, He felt like telling them to just forget it, to not make any plans at all. Half of them would probably get divorced. People got cancer. Kids overdosed. Pain was surprising, an endless joke where you were always the punch line.

It made him afraid for his daughter. He made the nurse bring her over so he could hold her. He sang her lullabies, he told her stories until she dozed in his arms, and when he had to hand her back to the head nurse, his heart felt emptied. Eyes wet, he stood outside the glass and looked at her. The head nurse in the nursery slowly began to soften toward him. She let him come into her office and be with his daughter. She shut the door, and once she brought him coffee and a cheese Danish. “She's a good baby,” the nurse told him. Her name was Gracie, and she wasn't much older than Jim, She told Jim his daughter slept most of the time, but sometimes she gravely watched what was going on around her. “It's as if she's waiting for something,” she told Jim.

“Can't I just take her home?” Jim said. “You could pretend to be in the other room, you could not see.”

“They'll put you in jail,” she said. “Then you might never see her.”

He was silent for a minute. “Listen,” she said. “You go home, get some sleep. You come back and you can sit in here with your baby as long as you like.”

He went home, and before he even picked up his newspaper on the porch, he knew it would have his picture in it. “Suspect Jim Archer,” it said. He bunched it up and chucked it in the trash. When he got inside the phone was ringing. “I know what you did,” a voice whispered. “I saw.”

Jim slammed down the receiver. He dug out the Yellow Pages from under the counter. He'd find a lawyer. But every name he called had already heard of him, and every name wanted a retainer that would clean out his bank account, his future. He didn't care. He arranged meetings with a few of them and then went to find the bankbook.

He always kept it in the same place. In the bottom of a secret drawer in the rolltop desk. But when he opened the drawer, it wasn't there. He kept flipping open the other drawers, ferreting about loose papers, clips, and staples, and finally gave up and went to the bank.

The teller he spoke to was a young girl with curly dark hair and stiff lacquered lashes. She didn't flinch when she heard his name. Illiterate, he thought with relief. Doesn't watch the news. She disappeared for a moment, and when she came back she blinked at Jim. “Mr. Archer,” she said, “this account's only got twenty dollars in it.”

“What are you talking about, twenty dollars?” Jim said, Something curled in his stomach.

She shrugged. She showed him the paper with the stamp across it. Five thousand dollars removed, gone as easily as a breath. “I didn't take that much money out,” Jim said.

“You did too,” she insisted. “Anyway, your wife did. Look, here it is. Here's the date. The signature.” Jim stared down at the paper, at Lee's rolling hand.

“Something wrong?” she said.

“Can I get a copy of this?” he said, trying to still the quake in his voice. He waited, impatient, and then gripped the copy from under the glass divider.

He fairly lurched out of the bank, his heart clipping. Out in the bright sunlight, he was suddenly overwhelmed. He kept seeing it—Lee's name, deliberately branded across the page, erasing the account and him, too, along with it.

He could walk to the police station from here. He could smack this on their desk and take his daughter home, and there was no longer any reason anyone would stop him.

4

The next morning Jim went to retrieve his daughter. Grade, a blue Kleenex tissue petaled about her nose, cried a little when she handed the baby to him. “Allergies,” she said, lowering stormy eyes. She plucked at the baby's toes. “It's a terrible thing to say, but I feel like she's mine.”

“Don't,” Jim said.

Gracie stammered odd bits of advice. Babies liked heartbeats, so Jim might want to buy a recording of the sounds infants heard in the womb. Babies took to water like small spaniels. “Take her into the bathtub with you,” she advised. “Hold her in the shower.” She told him how to handle the baby's head. What to feed the baby. How to sleep so lightly you might hear colic rumbling in a small, silky stomach. “So what are you going to call this little one?” she said.

For a moment Jim remembered all the names he had inked neatly onto a piece of paper.

“You have to give her a name, for God's sake,” Gracie said. “I certainly hope you aren't one of those people who are going to call their child ‘Junior.'”

He looked down at the baby. “I'll give her a name.”

“Listen,” she said, pressing a folded piece of paper into his hand. “The best pediatrician in town,” she said. He said good-bye to Gracie and ignored the other nurses. He strode right by the doctors and orderlies. He wished he could parade triumphantly past everyone in the entire hospital, even the patients. Two of the younger candy stripers cupped their heads together. He heard a dry, breathy whisper, like a wind washing dirty sand across a beach.

“We're out of here,” he said to the baby, and walked out of the hospital, the same clean way he imagined his wife had when she had taken out their savings as simply as she had taken away his life.

When he pulled into the neighborhood, it was barely ten, His parents wouldn't be arriving until noontime. The streets seemed deserted. Everyone who worked was already gone, the kids at camp or down at the playground. He didn't know what any one of them thought about any of this. No one had called to say “What a shame” or “I knew it would come to this” or “Is there anything I can do?” Not one person had invited him for dinner or said one thing about the baby, and no one mentioned the news reports. Still, he had his suspicions. He walked down the block and swore he saw curtains floating uneasily from the windows, a half-moon of face appearing. He walked by a group of his neighbors, all of them sitting on the curb, sipping sugary lemonade someone's kid had made, and although they boisterously offered him a cup, he could tell something else was going on, The laughter seemed to retract, the conversation to fade. And the other day he had come home to find Henry Sandlovitz, his neighbor from across the street, prowling nervously in Jim's yard. “Lost my golf ball,” he said, but when Jim came around to help him look, all they both found were the bright dandelions Jim had never really had the heart to pull. The two men stood silently looking at the flowery yellow heads, “You ought to borrow my power mower,” Henry said abruptly. Embarrassed, Jim kicked at the overgrown grass, releasing a wave of grasshoppers that hummed and trembled in the blades.

It was his fate, but the neighborhood somehow seemed to take it on as their own. Threatened by an unseen unease, wives suddenly came out to meet their husbands at the train station. Husbands, too, began bringing home roses in crinkly blue tissue paper or bottles of Spanish wine.

Later, Maureen Reardon, the one neighbor who would befriend Jim, would tell him just how all the women talked about him. As soon as they heard the first reports, everyone said they had known a marriage this young, this strange, would come to this. Lee seemed to be always alone, in those awful faded blue jeans and tattered sneakers, that hair like a wild woman's. They hadn't liked her playing with their girls. They studied Jim's pining silence after Lee had disappeared. They wondered, too, what it might be like to have someone missing you so much, it robbed them of sleep. The women argued over Lee, too. She was wild. Jim had spoken to some of them, but Lee had never said one word. They would have taken her under their wing. They could have showed her recipes, they could have shared hairdressers and long, lazy talks on hot summer afternoons.

Myths sprang up. When one of the women wanted to threaten their wayward daughters, Lee's name was invoked. “You'll end up a prostitute like Lee!” mothers shouted. “You'll end up dead on the side of the road!” Secretly, though, the daughters, and sometimes even the mothers, might be thrilled. Sometimes they imagined Lee had simply escaped, that she was now in silky red dresses, dining in a restaurant so expensive none of them could even imagine peeking at the menu. They thought of Lee on some older man's arm, diamonds sprinkled across her fingers. Lee not having to be bored and restless at home, waiting for her kids to amble back from school, Lee not having to wake up beside anyone except her own sweet self. Women hung damp, sticking wash onto backyard clotheslines. Their hands chapped. The wood clothespins sometimes splintered and infected in their skin. “Might be nice to be Lee on a day like this,” they told one another. “You can bet she's not hanging clothes.” Imagine leaving your baby, they said, but still they thought of her when the jammy fingers of their own kids tracked onto the walls, when a colicky baby kept them up one night too many. Could you love something you didn't let yourself know? Was a baby yours if you never claimed it?

Every moment, Jim was aware the baby was his. He had driven his daughter home with one hand laid gently across her. He had driven twenty miles an hour, not caring if the other drivers swore at him. He had brought the baby into the house, and as soon as he opened the door he felt the silence, alive, waiting for him, His throat ached.

The baby erupted in cries. He looked at his daughter, pained, and for a moment he wondered: Who would he rather lose, Lee or the baby? And the answer was always the baby. He let her cry for a moment and then began slowly, stubbornly, rocking her.

A half hour later his parents arrived in a cab, He bundled his daughter and stepped outside, They were loaded down with stiff brown bags and suitcases, and as soon as Gladys saw Jim and the baby, she burst into tears. Jack stood perfectly still, a brown paper bag dangling from one hand.

“I don't know who to hold first,” Gladys said. “Oh, that beautiful little angel! Here, let me take her. Please, I know how to hold a baby.” She cradled the baby in her arms. “What's this baby's name?”

“I haven't named her yet,” Jim said.

Gladys gave him a sharp look. “Well, you had better, don't you think?”

Jim threaded fingers through his hair. “I don't know what's the matter with me, not naming her,” he said. “There must be something.”

Jack embraced Jim roughly. “Don't you worry,” he said. “I've got a feeling about things turning out for the best.”

“What feeling?” Jim said, but his father turned and handed him a bag. “New Zealand apples,” Jack said. “A little bruised, but you can't get anything like that here, I bet.”

“Will you look at this house,” Gladys said. “We could have helped you find something nicer than this.” Gingerly she stepped inside. “I'll clean,” she said.

Jack put away the groceries, eyeing with suspicion the tomatoes in the crisper, “Dyes,” he said.

“Wrong,” Jim said. “They're from a garden next door.”

Jack suddenly lifted up two cucumbers. “You tell me which is garden and which is Top Thrift.” He moved his hands up and down like a balancing scale.

“Please,” Jim said, but his father waggled his hands again. Jim rolled his hands over the cucumbers. They looked exactly the same to him, so he took his cue from his father's face, from the way his eyes flickered when Jim's hand moved to the cucumber on the right. “That's yours,” Jim said.

“What did I tell you, his father's son or not?” Jack said. He slapped the wrong cucumber against his thigh in triumph.

“He gets his intelligence from mc,” Gladys said, cheering a bit, “And we're having both cucumbers in a salad.”