Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air

Caroline Leavitt

Dzanc Books
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright © 1993 by Caroline Leavitt

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published 2014 by Dzanc Books
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eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-18-0
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Published in the United States of America

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the New York Foundation of the Arts for financial—and moral—support during the writing of this book. I'd also like to thank my agent, Judith Weber, and everyone else at the agency—Wanda Cuevas, Craig Holden and Andrea Harding—for their committed support, enthusiasm and all-around wonderfulness. And of course, I want to thank my absolutely terrific editor Maureen Egen.

For attentively wading through the earliest drafts, I can't ever thank Linda Corcoran enough. And many thanks, too, to Jeff Tamarkin, Jo Fisher, Anne Edelstein and Jane Praeger.

I'd also like to thank Martha Rhodes, Peter Salzano, Barb Goren, Jerry Gale, Ivan Diamond and especially Nancy A. Lattanzi, for a multitude of kindnesses.

For my mother, Helen Leavitt.

And this book is dedicated, with all my love, to my husband Jeff Tamarkin, for absolutely everything.

INTO THIN AIR

 

 

 

BALTIMORE
. A 19-year-old Baltimore woman apparently disappeared from her hospital bed Tuesday morning, only hours after giving birth.

According to officials at Twinbrook Hospital, a nurse entering the private room of Lee Archer, 2134 Eutaw Pl., found her bed empty and no sign of her in the bathroom or on the maternity ward. After finding her clothes in the closet, officials then called police, but there were no signs of foul play, police said yesterday.

The woman's husband was said to be in a state of shock. Hospital officials said Ms. Archer had given birth Tuesday to a healthy daughter after an easy delivery. Nurses said the couple seemed tired but happy.

“We've never had anything like this happen here before,” said one hospital official who asked not to be named. “I haven't any idea what happened. I just hope she's okay, wherever she is.”

—Baltimore Daily Press
, July 6, 1988

1550 Warwick Avenue

Waltham, MA 02154   

July 15, 1988               

Dear Mr. Archer:

I think I have seen your wife, but I can't be sure. I think she had the room next to me at the Best Western just off the Beltway in Pikesville. She was coming out of the room next to mine and looked just like the girl on all those flyer's I saw posted all over town, only younger maybe. When I asked her what her name was, she said it was Beth. I remember because it was the same as mine. I thought about it all during breakfast. My husband said I was crazy and that it was none of my business anyway, but the more I thought about it, the surer I was. I was going to call the police when we got back to her room, but by then her room was empty. How could I have stopped her anyway?

I hope this helps you to find her, and I realize I don't get any reward, but that's all right. At least you know she's alive.

Sincerely,

Beth Brill (Mrs.)

1

Lee was almost two days out of Maryland when she saw the newspaper. She was struggling to eat dinner at the Moon Man, a brightly lit diner just outside of Richmond, hunched over with fever, fighting sleep. The waitress, harshly pretty, dimming into middle age, was dressed in starchy nurse's whites, a black apron cinching her waist. She took one long measuring look at Lee and then glided right over, leaning across the blue counter. “Anything else you need, honey?” she said. “There's hot coffee just brewed.”

Lee, sandwich midmouth, saw her over a horizon of grilled cheese. The waitress had a pink plastic Saturn bobbing over her left breast.
ADELE
, it said in careful curlicued script, She had lavender eyeglasses dangling from a tarnished chain about her neck and stiffly blonded hair pruned and shaped like topiary. She leaned toward Lee with so much cheerful concern, it made Lee nervous. “I don't drink it,” Lee said.

“You and my daughter both,” Adele said, swabbing down the counter with a dirty red cloth. “A full-grown woman and she lives on that lousy cocoa from a mix.” She made graceful parabolas with the cloth. “You kind of remind me of her. Neither one of you knows a single thing about nutrition. Jesus, just look at that plate of yours. Last I heard, grease wasn't exactly one of the four basic food groups. There's such a thing as a nice green salad. You could have ordered our tuna plate and made out just fine,” she said. Adele shook her head at Lee's circuitry of french fries and then lifted her cloth, rinsing it in the sink under a spumy stream of water. “You got kids?” she said amiably, wringing out the cloth. Lee flinched.

“Never,” she said stiffly, concentrating on the pale circle of skin where her wedding band used to be. She had gotten fifty dollars for it that morning at a jewelry shop right down the street.

“You will,” Adele said as if soothing her. “Why, you got plenty of time to change your mind.”

She started cleaning farther along the counter, joking with the men sitting there, scooping up tips and trash, stabbing on her glasses to squint out the total on a bill. “You interested in this?” she called, picking up a paper someone had left.
‘“Washington Post,”
she said, sliding it down the counter toward Lee, “Today's too and not a dot of gravy on it.”

Unnerved, Lee blinked at the paper in front of her. She hadn't once read a newspaper or heard the news since she had left Baltimore. She had been too rushed, too conscious of the trailing, ominous echo of footsteps, the delicate brush of an arm steeling to grab. It was the Post, she told herself, not the Baltimore Daily
Press;
it didn't have to have any news in there about her. She smoothed down the paper with the flat of one hand, but she suddenly felt uneasy, as if she were being watched. She stared back up along the counter, but Adele was pouring long foamy trails of coffee into chipped white cups; two men in faded plaid shirts were passing a crumpled pack of Camel filters behind the back of a third. Everyone under the watery glare of the fluorescent lights looked a strange sallow yellow, but they were living their own lives, not hers; she might have been invisible for all the attention she was getting.

To her left, the front door loomed. Six o'clock and the sun was still beating through the glass, and there she was, the only person here who was so shivery in the artificial cool that she was slouched into a wool plaid jacket half as yellow as her hair. She looked back down at the paper, anticipation muddied with fear.

Lee's focus stumbled across the front page, There were rumors of another nuclear disaster in Russia; garbled reports of possible radioactivity filtering through the drinking supply. The mayor had issued a war on drugs because his son had been shot to death while buying heroin in some back alley. He swore he had never so much as seen his kid take an aspirin, that's how clean the kid was.

She skimmed, past page two, pages five and six, bouncing her focus from picture to picture, catching only the first few words of every headline. There was nothing that even hinted of her. She was on page thirty already, with only two more pages of the paper to go, and then she turned the page, glancing uneasily at a small section, bannered in black, titled “Regional News.” And then she saw it. There, sandwiched between one story about a ten-year-old caught joyriding his mother's car in Pikesville and another report of a brutal parking lot murder, was a grainy black-and-white photograph. A girl with voluminous hair and a wobbling grave smile, one arm shielded stiffly across her body.

Lee's hands, in a sudden skip of fear, recoiled from the page. She knew that picture. Jim had taken it the day they had run away from Philadelphia to get married. They had been in a hurry, flushed, overdressed in the bruised June heat. Lee's father and his new wife were probably looking for her; they'd called the police once because of her, they could do it again. Still, Jim had insisted on posing her against the grimy edge of the waiting Greyhound bus. Leaning toward her, he had pushed up the collar of her leather jacket. As soon as he stepped away from her, she flipped it back down. Her green knapsack had bit into her shoulder, weighted with jeans and sweaters and books and half a dozen pieces of the intricately carved silverware her mother had left her. Lee still had a single silver fork, wrapped in disintegrating blue tissue paper, tucked carefully at the bottom of her purse. At night she gently peeled the tissue from the fork, turning it so it caught and broke up the light, studying her reflection in between the tarnish. She was enough of her mother's daughter to have inherited some superstition; sometimes she talked herself into believing the fork had powers. It might be this was a talisman, a protective gift from a mother who might watch more over her in death than she ever had in life. She'd wish on the tines, squinching her eyes shut so tightly that she saw stars of color pulse across her lids.

The photo wavered in front of her, the face of an eerily familiar stranger. Lee tracked it with a ragged edge of nail. She didn't even look like that girl anymore. All that hair was shorn. The lean angularity, the coltish boniness, were softened, That girl's life had nothing to do with hers anymore. That girl had still been in high school, barely seventeen, just a wild betrayed heart who had gotten into trouble once too often, who had had to flee to escape being sent away. A girl so panicky she had actually thought Jim was a temporary solution.

“That's some look on your face, sweetie,” Adele said, leaning over to her. “Someone you know die?”

“I changed my mind, I want the coffee,” Lee said.

“Now you're being smart,” Adele said, pivoting away,

Missing, the newspaper said. Missing. She was suddenly dizzy. The diner seemed to shift in space, disorienting her, and when she looked down at the newspaper again, the words beneath her picture braided together. Abruptly, she closed the paper and stood up, toppling her plate, skidding fries and gravy across the clean counter.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Adele said, setting down the pot, reaching for a rag.

“I have to go,” Lee said abruptly, glancing at the watch she wore that hadn't worked all week, Every time she looked down at it, it was the wrong time. She clicked open her purse, digging around for loose bills.