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

Slicing a tomato, she nicked the Formica. She fried the chicken in too much oil and left it in a solidifying bonnet of grease in the pot, her appetite vanished.
    She grabbed Frank’s aviator jacket, the one that Claire used to wear, and headed for the park in back of the elementary school. It had stopped hailing, but the air snapped around her; her breath was white mist. In the school yard a rusting swing set moved in the wind. Lee sat on one of the swings, the way she had when she was little, when Claire and Frank had both taken her. “Kick toward the stars!” Claire had told her, urging her higher and higher. She said it even on cloudy days, insisting it didn’t matter whether you actually saw the stars or not. They were still there, blazing in the firmament, as constant as love. Lee shut her eyes and leaned back on the damp seat. She kicked toward Orion.
    Claire would die a month later, the first and only time she had ever been hospitalized in her life. And with her death, Lee’s memory slowly began to dissolve. There was no funeral, she believed, no blur of guests in and out of their house, nothing but a dazed kind of emotional hibernation. It was her aunt Teddy who told Lee her life as if it were a story, spinning a beginning, middle, and end: how Lee had been taken out of school, how the two of them had waited for Frank to fly in from Texas. “You couldn’t stop crying,” Teddy said. “You couldn’t pick up a glass without having it shatter in your hand.” She had finally taken it upon herself to spike Lee’s tea with Valium, culled from her own private stash. Lee listened, but she felt this was all a kind of curious story about someone she didn’t know, that really, it had nothing at all to do with her.
    There were things she remembered: the stiff, knotted way Frank moved in the house, his refusal to sleep anywhere but the downstairs couch, despite the clean sheets spread on the double bed upstairs, the brand-new comforter Teddy had bought to make things less painfully familiar. She remembered too the Salvation Army truck coming to cart away Claire’s things. Stunned, she had watched the house emptying of her mother, until she had spotted the silverware Claire had promised her. “Wait!” she cried, scrambling to the truck, clawing at a pile of blouses and books. A man in gray coveralls stepped back, amused. “Go to it, sister,” he said. She pulled out the box. “This stays,” she said. “Whatever you say,” he told her, tipping an imaginary hat. Upstairs, heart beating helplessly, she carefully layered each piece in newspaper and tucked it at the bottom of her closet.
    She and Frank were ghosts. Neighbors sometimes came by, balancing cakes or casseroles in two arms, offering invitations to dinners neither one of them ever attended.
    She met Frank at the door mornings, She ate silent takeout pizza or Chinese chow mein with him evenings. After dinner Frank would walk. “Be right back,” he told her, but he was often gone for hours, and when he came back his eyes were red and puffy, his face bruised. When they talked it was about Lee’s grades or Frank’s next business trip or what kind of food to order in. They never mentioned Claire.
    â€œYou know,” Frank told Lee one morning, “all I have to do is tie up a few loose ends and then I’m not traveling anymore.” Lee looked up, interested.
    She stayed home when he went away, close to the phone, imagining he might call to say hello. Posted on the refrigerator, held in place by a rubber dinosaur magnet, was the number of the Dallas Hilton. She dialed. Eleven at night, his time. “Mr. Klantrell isn’t in,” the desk clerk told Lee. “Would you care to leave a message?”
    â€œNo, that’s okay,” Lee said, but of course it wasn’t.
    In the spring Frank came home with a small blue package for Lee, a smile spread across his