Into Thin Air (11 page)

“No, I was okay,” she said.

“Lots of vitamin C today,” he said.

They were halfway through breakfast. Lee took cautious bites of egg. She suctioned orange juice through a straw.

“You think it's fine, what you did?” Frank said.

Lee put down her glass.

“You think I like to be called into a station by the police? I thought something had happened to you. I could hardly drive straight for thinking it.” He dragged the edge of his plate toward him. “We can't live like this,” Frank said. “We absolutely can't.”

Janet scraped butter from her toast.

“You remember your aunt Bessie? In Ohio?” Frank said. “I think you met her once, when you were really little.”

“Didn't she have a cat or something?” Lee said.

Frank nodded. “Well, we want you to go live with her for a while.”

“Excuse me?” Lee said.

“She doesn't work, so she could keep an eye on you. The school system there's fairly strict, so there'd be no room for any of your monkey business.”

“You can't send me away,” Lee said. She looked desperately at Frank, who was calmly buttering his toast.

“What would you do, a daughter running wild? Suspended. Half-drunk. Picked up by the cops with a boy you don't even know?” he said.

“I wouldn't send her away,” said Lee.

Janet held up one hand, interrupting, “I know what you think. You think I don't love you, that all of this is my doing, but you're wrong.”

“Who cares whether you love me or not?” Lee cried.

Frank touched her arm. “You show us you can be responsible in Ohio, then you can come home.”

Lee, furious, flung down her napkin.

“You finish out the year here. But you're grounded. That means you come right home from school,” Frank said, “or there's going to be trouble. You don't go out nights unless it's with us. And I catch you talking to that boy and I'll see him jailed.” Lee slammed the door. “You hear me?” Frank cried, but she was gone.

Janet was the one who arranged all the details, phoning the high school where Lee would finish up her senior year. She called airport after airport, scratching out departure times on a stubby yellow pad, circling the ones that would have Lee vanished from the house before summer even started to heat up.

Grounded. The phone rang for her, but Frank always said she was out. He never said she'd call back. She was stuck in the house with Janet, who sang and rustled through fabrics and paint chips. She caught Janet standing in her room once, head cocked, and when she saw Lee she smiled.

All that week Jim was absent from school. She tried to call him from the pay phone by the gym, but each time a woman's weary voice answered, and Lee just hung up. She was moody and silent, uninterested in skipping class with Tony to meander in the fields behind the school, refusing to swig brandy from a thermos with another boy. She saw how it was, how they began shying from her, and she couldn't much blame them. She wasn't the good-time girl anymore.

Lee told boy after boy that she had been grounded, that she was being sent away. Tony gamely offered to cut Frank, “just a little over one eye, as a reminder.” Another boy, a vocational student studying small engines, wrote Lee notes riddled with broken clichés. “It's always darkest before the afternoon,” he scribbled. “Every cloud has a yellow center.” One boy, who had been expelled for firing a water pistol filled with tomato juice at a teacher, told Lee that since she was going, they should make up for lost time. His hand gripped a silky spill of Lee's hem, fingers found her thigh. Gradually the boys who used to hum around her began surrounding new conquests, leaving Lee by herself. Girls flashed Lee cold, triumphant grins.

She had fifty dollars in a bank account. She called all the airlines to see how far fifty dollars might get her, but then there was always the problem. Where would she go once she got there, what kind of a job could she get when she got there?

Lee was too much trouble for anyone except for Jim, who had bagged enough cat food and frozen food after school to have accumulated a bankbook two could live on. He had this plan.

He'd always feel that he had been the one to save her, Without him she would have ended up defeated in some little town or dead on the road hitchhiking home. Jim never would have let Lee go. He was making himself half-crazy when Mrs. Fisk told him he had gotten into school. Johns Hopkins. Full scholarship, and suddenly everything gelled.

“We'll leave together,” he said. “We'll get married.”

“Married—” She stepped back two paces, propelled by a sudden sharp flare of anger. “What kind of a solution is that? Why can't we just leave?”

He flushed, suddenly defiant. “It's the perfect solution,” he said. “You think anyone's going to bother with a married couple? It makes things that much harder.”

“You're wrong. It makes them crazier,” Lee said.

“You never say it, but you love me. I know you do.”

Lee dug her hands into the pocket of her skirt, glaring at him. “Why can't we just leave?” she said.

“Because I won't do it,” he said. “You think I'm going to get you someplace just so you can leave? I want something in return, and what I'm asking isn't so horrible, is it? I want to get married as soon as we can.”

“I'm not eighteen,” she said finally. “Neither are you.”

“But you will be, when? In January? And I'll be in November. All we have to do is lay low until then.”

“How can we get married?” Lee said.

“You just do it. You go see the justice of the peace or a judge and you say ‘I do' and that's that.” He looked past her, sighting something in the distance. “Who else loves you the way I do? You think that happens every day?”

“Love has nothing to do with anything,” she said.

For a moment his face changed. It was the first time she had ever seen him really angry, and it frightened her. His back straightened. “Oh, it doesn't?” he said politely. “You think about it.”

When Lee walked back into the house, everything hurt. The phone was ringing, and she plucked it up before Janet could get to it. Startled, she heard Frank's voice. His “Hello” was tired. “I'm not thrilled about this, Frank,” a voice said. “You can blame me all you want, but I'm just not. I'm too old for girls.”

“Just until she finishes high school, Bess,” Frank said. “Come on. You owe me.”

“I know it, but I don't have to be thrilled about it. What am I supposed to do with a teenage girl?”

“Nothing,” Frank said. “That's the whole idea. Nothing's what'll keep her out of trouble,” He sighed. “Just watch her,” he said. “That's all I ask.”

Lee hung up the phone, She went upstairs to her room, She didn't know how people fell in love. She knew the symptoms, the racing pulse, the way your words tangled up, but they had never happened to her. She dialed Jim's number. She kept telling herself that he loved her. What she was going to do wasn't so terrible, was it? It was what he wanted, and it would be just for a while. Just until she was on her feet. Until she turned eighteen and had some money. And maybe, maybe you could learn to love a person that caring, maybe you could even want to stay. When he answered, she said, “Yes,” and then burst into tears.

It was the secrecy Jim loved. He made Mrs. Fisk swear not to tell his parents, promising he would do it himself once he was settled. He didn't tell her about Lee, and he wouldn't tell his parents, either, not until she was his wife.

He planned. He had favorite words. Wife. Marriage. Johns Hopkins. He knew Lee didn't really love him, at least not yet, but he was certain the seeds were there, and that all it would take was some patient nurturing for them to flower. He saw his situation with Lee the same way he looked at a scientific experiment. A scientist didn't give up—you had glimpses of success, a vision of how things could be, and then you just worked your way to fulfill that vision. If he just could figure out the right formula, the right equation, he could make Lee completely happy. He knew it.

He started with finding them a home in Baltimore. He called Johns Hopkins from Mrs. Fisk's office, asking a swarm of questions about student housing, married housing, cheap housing, any housing. He scrawled names and numbers on a piece of paper; he figured budgets. “Trust me,” he told Lee. He took a day off school and caught the train to Baltimore to find them an apartment, and all that day Lee wandered from class to class, unable to concentrate, thinking how easy finding a home was for her father but how difficult it might be for a boy like Jim.

In the morning, at school, he told her he had found them a place, a rented house in a real neighborhood.

“A house?” Lee said. “That's a pretty big deal.”

“You'll love it,” he said, flushing with pleasure.

The secrecy, though, was difficult around his parents. His mother tousled his hair in the morning, and he wanted to fling his arms around her and hug her. He wanted to clap his father on the back and tell him he loved him. “You want the butter? It's right in front of you,” Jack said, annoyed when he caught Jim staring at him. In a card store he bought a handsome postcard, a scene of the Kentucky mountains, and wrote on the back: “I'm fine. Cannot explain right now. Will contact you later. Please don't worry. I love you both, Your son, Jim.” He stamped it; he'd mail it right before he and Lee left. It didn't seem enough, but he'd rather have his parents furious at his thoughtlessness than worried that he was dead, a smear of chemicals and bone on a highway.

They were going to leave the last day of school, two days before Lee was to be sent to Ohio. Frank had already bought her a shiny pink steamer trunk as a going-away present, leaving it open, encouraging her to pack. “I've started packing already,” Lee told Frank, thinking of the green army knapsack she carried her books in, the leather pocketbook she might be able to stuff. “We'll meet right in front of Ratner's Drugstore,” Jim told her. They'd hop a Greyhound to Baltimore; they'd get married as soon as Lee turned eighteen, then they'd get her high school records sent up and she could finish school.

The night before they were to leave, Lee packed her knapsack. She put in her favorite blue jersey dress, three black T-shirts, colored bikini underwear, deodorant, face cream, and her favorite pair of blue jeans. In the morning she'd dress in layers. A red T-shirt under a white rayon blouse under a black rib-knit sweater. A black skirt over blue leggings that could double as pants, over tights and socks and parrot green cowboy boots. She'd sling her father's leather jacket over her arm. Seventy degrees or not, Tony had taught her leather was always the material of choice, and it would serve her when the cold weather came. Winterized, she could shed layers on the long bumpy bus ride. She was about to tighten her knapsack when she remembered Claire's silverware spread out and shining on her dresser. She held open the knapsack and, using the flat of her hand like a spatula, swept the silver into her pack. Experimentally she hoisted it onto her shoulder. It was backache weight; a sprain would be a souvenir.

That night she couldn't sleep, She watched the clock track the hours toward morning, and at four she got up to make herself some tea. In the silent kitchen she willed Frank to come downstairs. She imagined him finding her there, how dramatic it would look, just a slight young girl sorrowfully sipping sugary tea. “Stay here,” he'd tell her. “I love you.” She drank three cups of tea, and as she drained the third she heard Frank's rumbling snore.

In the morning Lee was too nervous to eat, She made two peanut-butter sandwiches, one for Jim, and grabbed two Granny Smith apples. When Frank came into the room she stopped, lifting her face to his, waiting. He looked at her critically. “How you dress,” he said.

“All girls her age dress like that,” Janet said.

Seven-thirty. She had ten minutes to get to Jim. “Good-bye,” she said. She waited until Frank had stood, reaching for the sugar, and then she hugged him, hiding her face in the rough folds of his shirt. Startled, he pulled back, which made it both harder and easier for her to leave.

Jim was waiting for her, his own knapsack slung heavily over his shoulder. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep; his body jittered from side to side. “Let's go,” he said, taking her pack from her. “Jesus, what do you have in here?” he said.

“Things,” she told him.

She remembered the Greyhound ride. Squashed in the back of the bus, by the bathrooms. In back of a five-year-old who kept chanting “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” singsonging it until even her own mother slapped her. “Now. I told you to
stop
,” she said, flustered. Every time the bus stopped, Lee tensed. At one point a police car pulled the bus over, and she grabbed Jim's hand, but it was only because the bus had been speeding. “It'll be fine,” Jim told her, but she saw how unsteady his hands were. She marked time by what she might have been doing. Ten o'clock and struggling valiantly to remember how to conjugate the Latin verbs that had been her homework. Twelve and at a long lazy lunch. Three o'clock and snoozing in study hall. She imagined Frank, showing off a house, stopping to call Janet. “Honey,” he'd say. She thought of her aunt in Ohio, waiting, not wanting her, and then she leaned over and took Jim's hand and fell asleep.

Frank would hate Baltimore, Lee decided. Although the roads were sometimes tree-lined and woodsy-smelling, most of the city radiated from the beltway. Their house was a small white clapboard in a wooded suburb. Their lawn was the only lawn untended, sprouted with dandelions.

There was nothing in the house yet but electricity and hot water and the things they had brought with them. Four clean white walls she suddenly ached to vandalize, a polished wood floor she scuffed experimentally. Lee folded her arms across her chest and leaned uneasily against the wall.