Catching Air (4 page)

“Let me guess: You slept at the office, right?” she’d said once when he came in as she was leaving for school, his clothes rumpled, his expression guilty. At that point he was selling men’s suits at a retail store. “It must be so
busy
, fitting in your nocturnal clients.”

Nocturnal
was a word she’d studied for the school spelling bee she’d won—the one he hadn’t attended.

One night he and her mother had had an explosive fight—Kira could hear them yelling even after she’d pulled her comforter over her head and plugged her fingers in her ears—and the next day, her father had moved out.

“I’ll see you soon, K,” he’d said as he carried armloads of trash bags stuffed with his belongings out to his car. He’d tossed her a wink, but she’d just walked past him, down the front steps and onto the sidewalk and into town, where she’d gone to the library and had hidden for hours in the reference section, flipping the pages of a heavy book and watching the words blur. He’d called her that weekend, and the next one, but she’d refused to talk to him, which she knew secretly pleased her mother.

No matter how tight things became—and they became almost suffocatingly so, after her father left and sent only sporadic checks and they moved from the house to an apartment—her mother wouldn’t accept help. She wouldn’t
take
anything.

It wasn’t as if they ever didn’t have enough to eat. It was just that sometimes they ate rice and beans, or peanut butter sandwiches, for a few days running. Kira’s clothes and shoes came from the thrift shop. She didn’t mind wearing other people’s old clothes, but used shoes were the worst. No matter how clean they looked, they always smelled sour. Plenty of people had it worse, though, Kira’s mother always reminded her.

Kira understood that her mother was proud, but there was a time when Kira’s most fervent wish was for a little charity. She was about eleven years old, and she’d spotted a rack of Hostess cupcakes by the checkout line in the supermarket. Those cupcakes were symphonies of sugar and starch, the most delectable things imaginable.

Her mother had seen her staring and, miraculously, had plucked a cellophane package from the rack, putting it into their cart alongside a carton of milk, a box of cornflakes, iceberg lettuce, eggs, chicken breasts, and bananas. The treat stood out like an emerald glittering atop a pile of dirt. Kira could almost taste the smooth chocolate icing on her tongue, and savor the sensation of licking the creamy filling.

But then the cashier with the seen-it-all-before gaze had handed back the credit card and said, “It was denied.” It had happened to them dozens of times before. This time, though, a woman had stepped forward. She had long gray hair, although her face was young, and she wore clogs and a flowery dress. Even all these years later, Kira still remembered the pattern of those soft blue flowers.

“May I?” the woman had asked, holding out her own charge card. “I’ve had the same thing happen myself. Sometimes those silly machines just don’t work.”

Kira had looked at the woman’s kind face, then at the cupcakes, so close she could touch them. She wouldn’t even wait until she got home to eat them with a glass of milk. She’d rip apart the cellophane and devour them in the car and lick every sticky crumb off her fingertips.

“You’re too kind, but my husband must have just forgotten to pay the bill,” Kira’s mother had said, forcing out a small laugh. Kira could still remember how her mother’s lipstick had seeped into the vertical lines above her mouth, and how she couldn’t tell if her mother was angry or just embarrassed.

“We can send her the money,” Kira had said, looking at the woman with gray hair, who was nodding encouragingly.

“Don’t be silly,” Kira’s mother had responded, grabbing Kira’s upper arm and squeezing hard.

They’d left the cupcakes behind and driven home silently, and Kira had eaten another peanut butter sandwich for dinner, choking down bite after miserable bite. She was furious; she had enough money in her piggy bank to repay the woman! Why hadn’t her mother let her? Later that night, her mother had come into her room and rested a hand on Kira’s shoulder. Kira had pretended to be asleep, but her mother had spoken anyway.

“Two cupcakes aren’t worth our pride, honey,” she’d said. “We’ll buy some next time with our own money.”

Her mother had remembered, too: A few weeks later, there was a cellophane package on Kira’s pillow when she came home from school. Kira had sat on the edge of her bed, remembering the knowing eyes of the cashier and the sympathetic ones of the gray-haired lady, feeling the hard pinch of her mother’s fingers against her upper arm. The frosting and creamy filling and cake had turned into a paste in her mouth and she’d had trouble swallowing it.

Maybe, in an odd, circular sort of way, her father was the reason why she’d been put on probation at the law firm, since the idea of taking anything rankled her, too. Or maybe there was more of her mother in her than she cared to admit: After all, in the first grade she’d seen a classmate with a rainbow-colored eraser that she knew belonged to another girl, and she’d raised her hand and announced it to the teacher in front of everyone, ignoring the whispers of “Tattletale!” Brutal honesty was probably woven into her DNA, a genetic gift from her mother, along with a faster than normal resting pulse and the inability to relax.

“Are you still awake?” Peter was leaning up on one elbow, staring at her.

She started. “It’s just so hot.”

“It’ll be cooler in Vermont,” he said.

“Maybe we should get onto I-95 at the next chance,” she said. “We could be there in two days if we don’t take a lot of breaks. This was a dumb idea.”

Peter studied her for a minute, then reached for his door and opened it.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Instead of answering he walked around to her side of the car, opened her door, and reached for her hand.

She followed him to a patch of grass, where he lay down.

“It’s better out here,” he said.

“But the bugs,” she began.

“Shh,” he said. “Come on.”

So she lay in the crook of his arm and looked up at the stars. The air was soft and velvety, and though Peter smelled as bad as she did and the grass was itchy under her legs—at least she hoped it was grass and not the angry occupants of an anthill—a slight breeze cooled her skin.

“Was this a mistake?” she whispered. “I thought we needed a change, but maybe Vermont isn’t the answer.”

Peter sighed. “I don’t know.”

We’re stuck,
she thought, feeling fear grip her chest. They’d quit their jobs, sublet their apartment, and bequeathed their goldfish to a neighbor’s little girl. Maybe instead of leaping into something new, they should’ve analyzed their life to see where it had gone off track. How could Peter be thinking about having a baby, creating a new life, when they didn’t even know which direction their own would take?

But she hadn’t felt like analyzing, endlessly discussing, and carefully weighing the pros and cons. She’d lived her entire life that way. Just once, she’d wanted to be spontaneous and impractical—to leap headfirst into a thrilling new experience. Like Rand and Alyssa were always doing.

Fine, so she was a little jealous. It was hard to escape her envy when she’d schlep home, her feet aching and her mind feeling simultaneously jittery and dull from too much caffeine and too little sleep, to discover Peter turning over a postcard with a palm tree or Mayan temple pictured on the front. “Rand and Alyssa are taking up cliff diving,” Peter would say, reading off the back of the postcard. Or “They decided to go to Guadalajara for a month after they finish building a Habitat for Humanity house in Honduras.”

Sometimes Rand would e-mail a photo instead, and Kira couldn’t help but notice that Alyssa had the kind of long, sleek hair nature had denied Kira, and the toned body of a yoga devotee. Alyssa always seemed to be tanned, smiling, and free from the worries that jarred Kira awake at three on the nights when she was the most exhausted.

That was why she’d spent days deep-cleaning the carpets and washing down the baseboards before she’d labored over the Thanksgiving dinner she’d served them. She wanted them to admire the lovely home she’d created, even if it was just a rental apartment, and be awed by the juicy, brined turkey and rhubarb-apple pie she’d concocted. She wanted to show off a snapshot of her life with Peter at its best, too.

“It’s only a year,” Peter was saying now. He yawned and stretched his back.

Kira nodded. They still had their savings, and a small 401(k), and she’d put most of her paychecks toward paying off her school loans, so she now owed only about ten thousand dollars.

“One year,” she repeated, the words carried out on a sigh.

The next twelve months would be a kind of life pause for them, breathing room to figure out what they really wanted. Kira knew, for Peter, that meant a family. He’d often talked about having three or even four kids, while Kira thought two seemed like plenty. She needed to figure out a way to tell Peter she wanted to get through this year before they shook up their lives again. It wasn’t that she disliked kids. But something she couldn’t identify was holding her back; she didn’t feel ready yet for a child of her own. She dreaded having that conversation.

She sighed and stared up at the full, bright moon overhead.

• • •

The bright overhead fluorescent lights pierced Alyssa’s eyes. She stood in the aisle of the sprawling megastore and stifled a scream. She was starving. She felt dizzy. She desperately wanted to be anywhere but here.

She steered her cart down another aisle—naturally she’d gotten a cart with a faulty wheel that required her to hurl herself against it every few steps to keep it moving—and looked around as a headache clamped down on her temples. She was in the wrong place again; she needed sheets, and this aisle was filled with coffeemakers and Crock-Pots.

Did they need any of this stuff? Maybe she should pick up a coffeemaker; guests would definitely want coffee.

But . . . which one? Her morning caffeine ritual involved dunking a tea bag into a pot of hot water, but here were devices that let you put a little circular pod into the top of a machine, and then a latte or caramel cappuccino or hot chocolate would magically spurt out. Alyssa loaded the coffeemaker and a few boxes of pods into her cart, then reconsidered.

If they filled all the rooms in the house, they’d have eight guests. Some people drank two or three cups of coffee in the morning. Alyssa wasn’t a math whiz, but she could easily see that if they made one cup at a time, they’d be constantly running back and forth from the kitchen.

So, none of those cute little pods. She unloaded the boxes and put them back on the shelves and stared at the other coffeemakers until the features advertised on their glossy boxes danced and grew blurry before her eyes:
Programmable settings! Built-in grinder! Auto-shutoff!

Maybe she should get something to eat, even if the only offerings at the little snack bar were junk—huge, gooey slices of pizza, candy bars, and sodas in plastic buckets. No, all that sugar and starch would make her feel even worse. She’d kill for a banana. But if she tried to locate them, she’d get lost forever, finding her way out the exit door only when she was a gray-haired old lady with a cane—which they probably sold here, too.

She snuck glances at the people around her. None of them seemed to be having trouble. They were trotting briskly through the aisles, their carts filled, their wheels behaving. They looked happy, even! One woman passed, snatched a package of coffee pods from the shelf by Alyssa, and sailed on by, barely breaking her stride. Alyssa was definitely the outsider here. She’d never gotten the hang of shopping, never seen its appeal. She lived in cargo pants and T-shirts for work, slept in one of Rand’s old T-shirts, and had a few dresses for evenings out. What else did she need? She owned a lot of jewelry, but it was all handcrafted pieces she’d picked up on her travels, inexpensive trinkets that held memories and meaning.

When she and Rand were getting ready to move to Vermont, it had taken her only a couple of hours to pack her personal belongings: her photography equipment, her journals, a few sentimental items like the pressed wildflowers from a bouquet Rand had picked for her. She’d never felt the desire to accumulate stuff; it made her feel weighed down, tethered in place.

Cooking was Kira’s domain; she should let her sister-in-law pick the coffeemaker, Alyssa finally decided, knowing it was a cop-out.

She’d been in this store for almost an hour and her cart was empty, save for a trio of black picture frames that she’d tossed in on a whim. She’d driven an hour to get here. No way could she go home empty-handed. Rand was wielding a sander to refinish the big dining room table they’d bought secondhand, and Kira and Peter were driving up from Florida. Everyone else was managing this transition just fine—she needed to do her part. She turned her cart down a new aisle, then felt her iPhone buzzing in her pocket. The number was unfamiliar, but she answered it anyway.

“Alyssa? This is Donna Marin with Children from China.”

“Oh!” Alyssa said. She stopped moving, her cart squeaking to a halt. She’d never met the adoption liaison, but they’d spoken a few times during the past couple of years.

“Things are moving along, so I was calling to check in. I tried you at home,” Donna was saying, “but that number has been disconnected.”

“Actually, we just moved,” Alyssa said.

Donna Marin’s voice chilled by a few degrees. “Did you notify our agency? I don’t see any notation in your file . . .”

“No, not yet,” Alyssa said, feeling the smile drop off her face. “I mean, I was going to . . .”

There was a pause. “This is the third time you’ve moved in four years, correct?”

Why did she make it sound like that was a terrible thing? Alyssa pictured a frowning woman in severe glasses, making a big red X over the file Alyssa had so carefully constructed, the one with a photo of her and Rand holding hands on the cover and their “letter of intent” in which they promised to love and cherish an adoptive child.