Into Thin Air (5 page)

She waited a minute, listening to the girls, and then she carefully took out the gold tail of hair and divided it into four clumsy sections. She dropped pieces of it into the toilet, watching how it swam on the surface of the water, covering it completely. She had to flush three times before it went down completely, before the last pale strands had vanished. She continued to flush away her hair, always half expecting the toilet to back up, disgorging hair and water into the restaurant, visibly blaming her. When all her hair was finally gone, when the water was clear, for good measure, for emphasis, she flushed the toilet one last time.

When she walked out of the stall, the girls were gone. There was only one woman by the mirror, a blonde with a French twist, carefully blotting her bright red mouth by kissing the soft fold of a tissue. She took her eyes from her reflection for a moment, crumpling up the tissue, calmly blinking at Lee.

The girls were sitting in a booth by the door, bebopping to music from the minijukebox on the table, and they ignored Lee when she walked past them. Lee sat back down, picking at her cheese sandwich, at the fried potatoes already congealing from grease. Everything tasted funny, as if the grill needed to be cleaned. And then, shortly after that, Adele had given her the newspaper, and then she had seen her own face, from a photograph that had once meant something, peering out at her from a newspaper like a stain. Good-bye, good-bye, Again good-bye.

And now here she was. On the edge of the highway, waiting for a bus to take her somewhere, anywhere else, A sudden glare of headlights made her blink. There was the raw skidding sound of tires.

She fingered the newspaper for a moment. And then she bunched it up carefully and wedged it behind the green wood bench. She tried to shake the headache and the fatigue that were building. Cars whizzed past her, a blur of color, an occasional smearing arc of sound from a radio through an open window, pop songs rising and falling like breath. The bus should be coming soon. She could get on it, sit way in the back where the seats were patched with heavy black vinyl tape, where no one in their right mind wanted to sit, and she'd be left alone. She could ride to the train station or the airport, and then by tomorrow she'd be in another state altogether. And the day after that she could be someplace else. She wasn't anybody's wife anymore, Not anybody's mother. Anybody's daughter. She stood perfectly silent, just wishing under the stars, her image unfolding in the waves of heat and dust, and what she was then was so shimmery she could have been just another mirage.

2

Lee was almost in Richmond when police discovered that this was not her first disappearance, The detectives began gathering all kinds of stories about her, patching together her past as if such a thing might actually lead them to her present. Lee's father and stepmother were glad enough to talk to the police, and Jim was far too stunned to understand what any of his telling was later going to cost him.

It was Lee's stepmother, Janet, who blamed Lee's behavior totally on Lee's mother, a woman she admitted she had never met. Claire's death, she said, had turned Lee into a piece of bad business—one of those girls who was always arrogantly sucking on a cigarette, a cheap bit of fluff with her skirt hiked too short and her hair in a scramble. Claire, she said, probably never should have been a mother at all. A woman who had never been able to stand still for two moments couldn't be counted on to give a daughter the attention she needed. No, Claire had had moving in her blood, a kind of jittery quality that she passed right along to her daughter.

“That's not how Claire was at all,” Frank said to the police. Janet carefully folded one hand over the other.

He admitted Claire was in love with moving, but not the way you might think. When she had met Frank, she had been a gym teacher at Philadelphia High, Every morning she dressed in the same ugly shortall her students wore. It was made of rough cotton the color of boiled salmon, but Claire did what she could to improve the style. She hemmed the clumsy, too wide legs to show off a flash of white thigh; she stitched the short sleeves into a kind of jaunty submission. She was dazzling back then, with the kind of wild beauty Lee would later grow into. Small and slender with impossibly pale skin, she was almost overpowered by masses of yellow hair she sometimes braided into a moving, glorious spine. Most kids cut gym class, but not Claire's girls. They adored her because she seemed so indifferent to them. “You want to pass this class, you have to work at it,” she told her girls sternly, slapping a sharp black pencil against a yellow attendance sheet, but after a few weeks anyone could see that Claire didn't really care at all what you did. She took attendance and then somehow you were on your own. When the class played softball in the muddy field outside, you could slink and hide behind an oak, cringing when Claire walked past, but she never said anything to you. You could edge farther and farther back in line, until it was too late to have to climb the ropes hanging from the ceiling. It made the girls want to be noticed. Some of them hurled themselves after Claire; some of them actually got some praise or a smile or sometimes a brief, bearlike hug, but come the next class, Claire would seem to have forgotten the achievement altogether. The girl would be as much a stranger to her as any of the others, To Frank, who snuck into the school one day to watch Claire's class, it seemed as though she were giving class only to herself, that all the girls were somehow superfluous. “I'm just setting an example,” Claire told him later, She would dive into the pool, seallike in a black tank cut high on her hips. She burned her palms climbing the ropes, somersaulting when she reached the top, She ran and batted balls right out of the playing field. Her laughter belled out, reverberating in the gym. At the end of the class she was filmed with sweat, her hair clouded out from its braid. She clapped for the girls, and they for her, the same way it was done in a ballet class she had taken once, and then, as soon as they were gone, she forgot them. It was funny when Frank thought about it, but in all her years of teaching, with all the excited stories she told him, she never really mentioned any one girl more than once. She really never prodded and pushed any girl at all, Not until Lee.

Frank, when he met her, was just starting Franklin Homes, his business. His very livelihood depended on people uprooting their lives. He'd buy the houses they were leaving behind, renovate them, and resell them at a profit. He courted his clients energetically, buying them theater tickets and dinner and sometimes taking the lonelier ones home with him. The clients seemed to love Frank. He made people think he was their best friend; he remembered birthdays and anniversaries and even the dandyish names of their house pets, but he always dropped his clients as soon as he made the sell; his friendliness evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. That was always the pattern, up until the moment he met Claire, and then suddenly everything changed.

He was trying to sell her a house he had renovated, a Cape Cod in a wooded Philadelphia suburb. She was just a slight blonde in running shoes and a boy's white T-shirt, her hair too long, her hands in the pockets of her blue jeans, but something about her took hold of him. He had never seen anyone move so quickly. He couldn't keep her in his sight but instead had to satisfy himself on quicksilvery glimpses of her as she blazed past him. One moment she'd be stretching up to see the top of the built-in bookcases, snapping down again like elastic; the next moment she had whisked into another room to peer suspiciously into the stove. She took the cellar steps five at a time and bounded back up at a clip. “Leaded glass,” he said, pointing to a small window over the door, trying to get her to stay still long enough to look. “We have plenty of time,” he offered, but she was already in another room. She looked at everything in the house and decided she liked it, and then she decided that she liked Frank, too. She watched the way he stroked the moldings, the tender way he touched a brick wall. It charmed her how in love he was with a thing as basic as a fireplace, as simple as a square of turquoise tile in the bathroom.

She had heard of him before she even called Franklin Homes, People said he had wonderful houses, but women told her how handsome he was, how black and curly his hair was, how blue his eyes. What a charmer, they said. There were women who did nothing but call up Franklin Homes on the pretext of looking at houses just to have time with him, but he always ignored the dinner invitations offered him. The late night phone calls asking for advice were nothing more than that to him. “Confirmed bachelor,” women said.

Claire must have known she was having an effect on him because in the dining room they seemed to have switched roles. It was Claire who pointed out the built-in cherrywood hutch, Claire who admired the bay window. In the backyard he forgot to show her the secret passageway, the garden he had landscaped. He stood there, foolishly rocking on his heels, mesmerized by all that energy, by the way she seemed to gleam. “I'll think about the house,” Claire told him before she drove off, thinking about him. And that night, alone, while figuring mortgage rates, Frank wrote out her name in a tiny perfect constellation of stars.

They began seeing each other. He courted her with houses, taking her to the ones he was proudest of, surprising her with picnics on polished parquet floors, with an impromptu waltz across a black-and-white-tiled kitchen. He didn't really want her to buy a house, not unless it was with him living in it with her, so he quoted prices she could never quite meet, assuring her he would do what he could to bring them down, And for her, he exercised. He was gangly and tall, a man who tripped on flat surfaces, Unathletic, clumsy even, he struggled to win her, He skied with her in Vermont, breaking his ankle because he was too ashamed to stay on the bunny slope where he belonged. Camping in the mountains, his arms and legs brightly jeweled with mosquito bites, he came down with a poison ivy so virulent, he had to be hospitalized. “Listen, you don't have to do any of that,” she told him, and she meant it. She had fallen in love with the way he loved houses, with the smell of his skin in the mornings, not with how high he threw a ball. It was his company she liked, not his prowess, but to please him, she claimed her running time could be cut in half just by his running beside her, shouting to her in breathy gasps that he loved her.

So they married, and a year later Lee was born. “She was her mother's daughter,” Frank said. “Born to move.” She was a jittery baby who bounced and jumped, a little girl with a fine tumble of blond curls who stomped down the pavement in real pint-size Nike athletics because Claire believed if you were going to do anything, you might as well do it properly. All Claire had to do was look at Lee and she saw herself, and because of that, Lee was the first person Claire really pushed. She wouldn't let her give up. She'd run with Lee, shouting at her to try harder, to do more. She began noticing the girls in her class only so she could compare them with Lee. Claire's favorite sport was tennis, and when Lee said she didn't like it, Claire was hurt. “You don't have to take it personally,” Lee told her. “Of course I take it personally,” Claire said. “You're my daughter.”

There was nothing Claire wouldn't do for Lee, She bought her water skis and cashmere sweaters, and when Lee wanted her ears pierced, Claire insisted on doing it herself, surprising Lee with a pair of sparkling blue studs. The two of them would sit outside after a run, talking like pals, giggling and rolling in the grass.

At thirteen Lee could beat her mother at tennis and water-ski without tangling herself up in the tag line. She played softball summer evenings with a few girlfriends; she roller-skated with a boy down the street. And with Claire, she ran. The two of them often ran without Frank. Streaking effortlessly down the road, Claire would call out to Lee, making her laugh at some silly joke so she wouldn't notice the throbs of pain. When they came home they'd have their arms about each other.

Lee, though, was never as addicted to sports as her mother. She was as dreamy as she was active, sinking into reverie as naturally as breathing, All she had to do was look at the sky and she imagined what it would be like to fly; all she had to do was see a boy she liked, and in her mind she was slow-dancing with him or sharing ice cream or holding his hand. One thing was never less real than another—dreams or dirty dinner dishes, new skates or a new book. She was almost never without a book in her hand, and at first both Frank and Claire encouraged her. Frank built her her own pint-size cherrywood bookshelf; Claire began buying her leather-bound books that might last. “Such a smart girl,” Claire said, but then Lee began spending more and more time in her room, devouring books as if she were starved for words. On a balmy spring day Lee would be curled in Frank's armchair, reading one of the books he had brought home for her,
Jane Eyre
or another story by one of those frantic Bronte sisters, or any number of titles Claire remembered wrestling with during her own days at school. She could entertain herself alone for hours; she could ask for nothing. “She's independent, that one,” Frank said proudly, but Claire shook her head. “Leave her alone,” Frank said, remembering his own reluctant devotion to sports. “She's just fine.”

“You're right,” Claire said, but still, every time she found Lee just sitting on the kitchen stool, in a kind of trance, her eyes unfocused, her mouth a drowsy, amazed O, Claire would shake her. “Look out that window.” Claire advised, making her finger into a fierce point. “You see that day? You could be put in jail for wasting a day like that.” If Lee were reading, she would sometimes snatch the book from her hands. “Get some fresh air,” she said. “Do something.”

“I am doing something,” Lee said.

“Circulate your blood,” Claire insisted.

Lee, resigned, would dress for running, but inside her sweatshirt she smuggled a copy of To
Kill a Mockingbird
. She'd ambulate lazily on the sunny grass before she stretched, and then she ran, sprinting straight over to the elementary school two blocks away, and then she'd settle on one of the fire escapes and read undisturbed until dusk called her home.