Read Online Into Thin Air by Caroline Leavitt - Free Book Online

soon as she said it, Lee noticed with a shock how thin her mother was, how her skin had grown so translucent you could see the veins webbed beneath. “There are things you can do,” Lee said.
    Lee began buying medical books from the drugstores, In class, while everyone else was diagraming sentences, Lee read about melanomas. At night she dreamed her own cells were flowering like weeds. She came home with alternatives for Claire. A macrobiotic diet of vegetables and rice had cured cancer in California. Laetrile in Mexico. Psychic healers. Lee and a girlfriend went to one of the gypsy storefronts. Lee, twisting her skirt in her hands, told a bored woman in a red turban about Claire. “Can you help?” she said. Exasperated, the woman nodded. “Of course I can help,” she said. Then she told Lee she would make seven white candles from a very special kind of beeswax. Lee would have to light them every night, without fail, and after four days the death curse would be gone. “Poof!” the gypsy said, jointing her hands like wings.
    â€œSeventy dollars.”
    Lee, stunned, looked at her friend. “I d-don’t have that,” she stammered. “What about your friend?” the gypsy said, glancing at the other girl, who shrank back.
    â€œNeither one of us has it,” Lee said.
    â€œGet it,” the gypsy suggested pleasantly.
    Sometimes Claire listened to Lee’s odd cures. She’d burst out laughing. “Oh, this does me good,” she said when Lee told her about the gypsy woman. Sometimes, too, she grew quiet. She would draw Lee to her and hold her for a moment, breathing against Lee’s hair. But more and more she simply began shutting off when Lee began to speak. She would reach for the remote control for the TV and click it on, drowning Lee out. Anytime there was a sports program on, an interview with an athlete, she switched channels immediately. “Anything can happen,” Lee insisted. “Yes,” Claire said, “and anything usually does.”
    She lay in bed, talking back to the soap operas. “How can you be so dense!” she cried. “Tomas slept with Aria!” Lee brought her in trays and magazines and the cards that sometimes still came in from her old students, but the cards seemed to depress her. Gradually she just left them unopened on the tray. Lee read aloud to her, articles and recipes, and sometimes just the TV listings, which Claire loved. “It compresses whole lives in a sentence,” she said. “You know what’s going to be the outcome,” Claire leaned across Lee abruptly and reached for the phone. Determinedly, she dialed. “Frank Klantrell,” she said, pausing, wrapping one hand about the phone wire. “Well, when can he be reached, then?… I see…. No. It’s not necessary…. No. I said no message.” She thudded the receiver back into its cradle and turned her head toward the window. Outside, snowy hail pelted the grass. Lee held up a glossy photo of a model twirling in a purple cape. “You like this?” she said hopefully.
    Claire, distracted, focused on Lee, “I like sleep.”
    â€œI was going to fix chicken for dinner,” Lee said. “Chicken’s healthy. It has these special enzymes or something. I read it.”
    Claire hooded covers over her head. “You eat.”
    â€œYou want me to read to you later?”
    Claire, body sloped toward her cave of sheets, stopped her decline with an elbow. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re my beautiful girl.”
    Lee, who just that day in school had been compared unfavorably to a beaver, shrugged.
    â€œYou know what?” Claire said. “I hope you’re going to be a real heartbreaker.” She slid under the covers.
    Dismissed, Lee went downstairs. She chopped vegetables right on the counter. She was furious with her father for going away, furious with Claire for giving up.