Into Thin Air (15 page)

He bolted awake, tumbling from the couch. Stunned, he peered in the darkness, rearranging shapes into the things he recognized. There was the clock. Over there the bookcase. He stood up and opened the front door, and as he did the neighbor's yellow cat poised on the railing, eyes dilated with the night, then jumped inside. “Hello to you,” Jim said. He fetched the cat some milk, but it was so sour and cheesy that the cat wouldn't touch it. In the reflection of the toaster, Jim's eyes were swollen. The cat prowled for a while and then fussed at the door. “Fine, leave me, then,” Jim said, opening the door and popping the cat out into the night like a cork.

His eyes burned. He slapped out the front door, leaving it open. Thieves wouldn't get anything worthwhile; a stereo system so terrible he hated to play his albums on it. A TV that flickered and snowed. The same Brownie camera he had taken from Philadelphia the day he and Lee had run away to get married.

He got into the Dodge and began driving, heading for the highway. Four in the morning, and the road was still alive with cars. Where did people go this time of night? He glanced into the cars, but the faces he saw were always unreadable, impassive. He kept glancing alongside the road.

Lee had always been in love with highways. She carried maps in her pocketbook. South Dakota. Wyoming and Tennessee. Sometimes she inked in routes, linking the names of roads she liked with other roads. She had her license, but she told him neither Frank nor Janet trusted her to drive, and she didn't have money for her own car. Some nights he had let her drive, but it had scared him a little. She was so reckless. She weaved in and out of the roads, she speeded and dared.

Nights when he came home late from class or study group, Lee was sometimes sleeping. Sometimes, though, the house was silent. He worried at first. The notes she sometimes left him were cryptic. Went out, they said. But he didn't like being in the house without her.

He didn't know what she was doing at first. Oh, he could imagine all right. Lee drinking Scotch at some seedy bar outside of town. Lee dancing with her head fitted into someone's shoulder, He drove out looking for her. He checked the Silver Spoon, but she wasn't there, and the other waitresses gave him such mocking grins that he pretended he was just picking up some cigarettes from the machine, that he knew perfectly well where his wife was. He checked the record stores, winding up and down the aisles, buying a few tapes to keep him company in the car.

She wasn't at the Dairy Queen or the roller rink; she wasn't at the bookstore, reading the last pages of all the novels she might want to buy. He was exhausted when he decided to drive home. He didn't trust himself on the road when he felt this sleepy; besides, he was sure she was home by now, he was certain he'd find her lying on the couch, reading, half-asleep, smiling up at him drowsily.

That night he had been almost home when he first saw her walking along the shoulder of the road. Amazed, he slowed down. She was in jeans and red sneakers, her father's leather jacket zipped to the throat. She held her head very high, and her hair expanded in the breeze. He got close enough to see her smiling, close enough to beep the horn so that she started, turning toward him, her face white. When she saw him, her smile dissolved. She stood there, the highway lights flickering in a corona about her. He leaned over and opened the door for her. “Get in,” he said, She burrowed sulky hands into her pockets, “Please,” he said. His voice sounded foreign to him. “Please,” he repeated, and then she got in the car and sat beside him. “What's wrong with my just walking?” she said abruptly.

“I'd like to walk with you,” he said, and instantly regretted it.

“The highway's dangerous, that's why,” he said.

Lee rolled down her window so the wind lashed her hair against the pane. She looked out as the car swallowed the miles toward home, “I won't walk the highways,” she said. “I'll walk someplace else.”

“The neighborhood's fine,” he said. “People know you. They'll watch out, Walk in the neighborhood.”

She was silent. He kept waiting for her to say something to him, to burst into tears so he could loop one arm about her, to rage so they could at least connect in a fight. But when he looked over, he saw she was asleep.

He had carried her into the house that night, laying her into the bed, covering her with the yellow quilt. He bent to kiss her. “Sleeping Beauty,” he said, but she didn't wake when his lips anointed hers.

She never stopped walking the highways, and he never stopped driving around to find her and bring her back home. He couldn't think of a single thing to do to make her stop walking the highways. He imagined it was the town she was bored with, and sometimes he imagined it was him, that all his studying made him boring. He dressed up and surprised her with reservations just outside of town. He once bought theater tickets in Washington. She had good enough times. She was flushed with pleasure. He felt a rush of desire for her, but when he reached to touch her, she didn't react. She was still traveling.

The night Lee disappeared, Jim drove for two hours. The only person he saw on the road was a young hitchhiker, a girl in a blue dress and white cowboy boots with her thumb jabbed out. He drove past her in a rigid fury because she was another one in love with the road, and then half a mile away he thought of her getting into the wrong car, ending up a smear on the highway, and he swerved the car around to go get her. He'd lecture her; he'd scare her with stories Lee had laughed at. Men who scissored victims in their cars and kept the pieces in mason jars in the trunk. White slavers. The highway, smooth and glossy black, was suddenly so completely empty, it astonished him. He stopped the car, sitting perfectly still, waiting, listening, thinking all the time he would sit there forever, if it would bring Lee back.

By morning Lee was already a news item. While shaving, Jim heard about his wife's disappearance on the news. He stood perfectly still and then slumped onto the edge of the tub. The news announcer didn't mention anything about Jim being suspect, or that he wasn't even allowed to take home his own baby. The authorities are still on the case, the announcer said. And then, in a seamless shift, the story was suddenly about a skirmish in the Far East. Casualties were listed.

He was afraid to get up, afraid to go out into the neighborhood. It was still early, not even seven o'clock.

He had to call Frank, to reach him before the police did, Frank had threatened him once, said he would kill him. Lee had sent him two cards, one when she got married, one when she was pregnant, and he hadn't answered either. Jim's stomach tightened. He dialed.

“Yes?” Frank's voice, anxious, slipped on the line.

“It's Jim,” he blurted. “It's about Lee.”

“You found her?” he said, his voice speeding up. “I've been on long distance with some detective all evening.”

“No, I didn't find her,” Jim said. “I thought maybe—if she was all right—she'd have called you.”

“Me.” Frank's voice turned suddenly bitter. “She ran away with you. She'd call you.”

“Please, if you hear anything, will you call me?”

There was silence. “Why didn't you call me?” Frank said. “Why didn't you let me know as soon as she was gone? Why do I always have to hear things about my daughter from the police?”

“I'll call you,” Jim said.

“Yes,” Frank said. “You call me.”

When he hung up, he was sweating. His shirt was pasted to his back. He looked at the clock. Nearly eight, If he hurried, he could get out before the neighborhood started waking up and realizing just what had happened. He wasn't due at the police station until nine, but when he stumbled in, it was eight-thirty. Bunched under his arm was a small packet of photographs: Lee when they had first run away, Lee in front of the apartment, Lee sitting on the porch of their house. There was Lee pregnant in the freak March heat wave, her hair pulled into a ponytail. He had a few letters, too, samples of her handwriting; he had the marriage license he had almost framed, he had been so excited about it.

They had him talk to a new detective this time, a woman with severely cut brown hair and red glass earrings. She nodded sympathetically at the photos before she tucked them gently into a folder. At one point she told him she would do everything she could to help him. “I lost my husband just last year,” she said, and Jim, surprised, saw that her eyes were starting to tear. “Heart attack. He got up from the table to get coffee and then—well, that was it.” Jim started to reach toward her, to pat her hand in his awkward way, but she suddenly resettled herself on her chair. “Well, it's different here, isn't it?” she said. “What else can you tell us?”

There was something oddly safe about being at the police station, telling story after story about Lee. It was a kind of company, talking to someone, and every detail he revealed about Lee made her somehow more real to him, more there. He didn't tell everything. He didn't tell about Lee's walking the highways; he didn't tell her that he had coerced Lee into marrying him, that he had made it a condition of her freedom. And sometimes he told things that only could have been true. He insisted Lee was crazy to have this baby, that she had even picked out names. He was lost in reverie, he embellished details so lively, he half began to believe they were true. “We were very much in love,” he said. “People used to stop us on the street and comment about it.”

The detective looked at him. “I see,” she said, “Any other person she might have cared for?”

“We loved each other,” Jim said stiffly.

He remembered, months before she had gotten pregnant, how he had felt her interest in him rising. She bought him denim shirts and told him he looked handsome in them. She cut his hair and grinned with him into the mirror when she was finished. “Now you look cool,” she said. Sometimes she would take his arm when they were walking. Sometimes she would give him a kiss for no reason at all. And sometimes, too, in the middle of the night, he would wake to find her slowly massaging his stomach, kissing his thigh, needing him. And then she got pregnant, and just as abruptly as it had flowered, her interest waned. He told himself it was just because she was preoccupied, just because she was scared, When he put his arm around her, she removed it. “I feel too hot,” she said. When he kissed her she pulled away, “What's wrong?” he asked. “Don't make me ask you what's wrong twenty times before you tell me. Save some time and tell me now, why don't you?”

“Nothing's wrong,” she said. “Everything's fine.” But he saw how her face was crumpling. “Lee,” he said, “What's wrong.”

“Nothing,” she told him.

For the first time, then, dressing better, remade by Lee, he began to notice other women's interest. They smiled when he passed. One woman shyly offered to buy him dinner if he would help her study. And in the library there was his biology lab partner, Linda Lambrose. She was thin and lovely and smart. She smelled of lily of the valley, and she had a mane of curly red hair.

Still, as intoxicated as he was by other women, he had come home for Lee, but the house was empty when he got there. There wasn't even a note on the table, a scribble telling him where she might be. He felt his heart hardening. He got back in the car and began driving, and he wasn't even on the highway when he spotted Lee, bundled in an old red sweater of his, walking purposefully down the road. Her hair whipped behind her, and even from a distance he could tell that she was smiling. Furious, he banged the horn at her. He jerked open the door while she blinked at him, slightly dazed, like something caught.

She was pleasant enough in the car. She told him she had gone miniature golfing by herself that night, that she had done well enough to keep the scorecard. She touched his arm as she talked, but her friendliness suddenly irritated him. The car suddenly smelled faintly of lily of the valley, and if he concentrated, he could imagine Linda sitting beside him, one hand lightly on his shoulder.

The calls began that day. Reporters wanting to talk to him, and at first he would. He kept offering rewards, he kept talking about how much in love he was with his wife, but they always referred to him as suspect. “What would be my motive?” he shouted. “You tell me one reason why I'd do something to her. And what would I do? You think she's buried in the backyard? You think she's in pieces somewhere? You go and find her, then,” The reporters shrugged. Some looked as if they were considering his requests, and after that he refused to talk to reporters at all.

He thought about not answering the phone at all or about getting a machine, but he kept imagining Lee calling him, hanging up on a machine, and then spinning out into the distance away from him.

That evening his father called. “Why didn't you call and tell us yourself?” he demanded. “I'm your father. Didn't you think I'd want to know I was going to be a grandfather? Didn't you think I'd want to know about all this going on?” His anger coiled across the phone wires. “The police called us,” he said. “I didn't tell them one damn thing.”

“I called you yesterday,” Jim said. “No one was home. And I was going to tell you about the baby.” He caught his breath. “Oh, hell, they didn't have to call you,” he said.

“Well, they did, and I kept my mouth shut. I acted like I didn't even know Lee.”

“You could have said what you wanted,” Jim said.

“Not me, I didn't,” Jack said.

He wanted to know if Jim was all right, if he needed money. “Your mother wants to know if you want to come home and stay for a while. You know, be in a different place.”

“I can't do that,” he said. “I have to be here.”

“Then we're coming out there,” Jack said.

He thought of the police wandering around, the newspapers. He thought of his daughter, still in the hospital because he was considered too dangerous to take her. Between his father and him, the lines hummed.