3

The evening of Lee’s disappearance from the hospital, a half hour before the police were contacted, Jim was speeding down the hospital corridor, a red velvet box of chocolates tucked under one arm. It was dinnertime. Candy stripers nudged shiny steel meal carts through the corridors. Faint plumes of steam spiraled from under the covered steel dishes. One of the candy stripers looked frankly at Jim. “Nobody brings me no candy,” she flirted, but Jim didn’t even smile.

He was exhausted, a little stunned from the hard bright heat outside. He hadn’t eaten all day, and he was drained from the three hours of exams he had just finished. Thank God, though, school was all out of the way now. He had the whole long lazy summer to spend with Lee and the baby.

He had almost not taken his exams. He kept thinking he shouldn’t leave the hospital, that he should be with his wife.

“Come on, she’s sleeping,” Lee’s doctor said.

Lee’s doctor’s name was Anna Leighton. She had short spiky black hair and red lipstick she kept biting off, Lee had found her by stabbing a finger into the Yellow Pages. Jim had liked her because the whole time of Lee’s pregnancy, Anna had made herself available to him, Anna didn’t seem to see anything strange about Jim’s calling her to find out why Lee’s fingers and feet were swelling; why Lee sometimes had nightmares so terrible, she’d refuse to go back to sleep. Anna was warm and calm amid the damp waves of Jim’s panic. She never asked to speak to Lee when Jim had phoned her, although she always reminded Jim to tell Lee that Lee could call anytime, that no question was too stupid, and she never seemed to hold it against Lee that Lee didn’t.

When Jim had persisted in asking if Lee’s deep sleep was normal, Anna became annoyed, In truth she was still a little irritated with him for trying to keep barging into the delivery room after Lee had shouted at him to get out. It just made it harder for Lee, who was panicked enough. Fathers sometimes fainted in delivery rooms; they sometimes were a nuisance. She herself had delivered over a thousand babies that she praised and cuddled and loved for the few minutes she held them, but because of the behavior of a few fathers, she couldn’t imagine herself having one.

Jim couldn’t wait for Lee to wake, She had been so nerved up during her pregnancy. She didn’t want him telling his parents until after the baby was born. “I can’t handle visitors right now,” she said. “Stop worrying,” he had soothed her. “We have enough money. We’re going to be fine.” He had worked hard trying to show her what a great father he was going to be. He was the one who spent hours mixing shade after shade of yellow, who painstakingly glued glow-in-the-dark silver stars on the ceiling so the baby would look up and wonder over the Milky Way. He went to Baby World himself between classes and bought the small white crib and the changing table; he bought the mobile and the baby dresser with a parade of pastel ducks across it. He’d stand in the center of the room and swear he heard the baby. If he concentrated, he could smell the sweet, sharp tang; he could feel talcum powder sifting through the air. He grasped Lee’s arm. “Just come in there and stand with me.” But she wouldn’t stay for long, and he never understood it. “Don’t you like it?” he asked her.

“It’s bad luck,” she said.

“No, no, it’s good,” he insisted, but after that he didn’t press. She was anxious enough.

He didn’t believe in bad luck. None of it had scared or worried him up until the moment Lee went into labor. He couldn’t help her—no matter what he did, how he held her or touched her or panted helplessly along with her, none of it made one bit of difference. When she had shouted at him to get out, get out, he had moved closer to her. Lee’s nurse had gently taken Jim by the arm and shepherded him to a chair outside.

“Listen,” she soothed, She looked to be his mother’s age, and it suddenly comforted him. “Hard labor doesn’t mean a hard birth, I popped mine out like kittens.” He blinked at her. “She’ll be fine,” she said, patting his hand. “And so will you.” She had lied, he thought. He kept twisting himself up, and when Lee was in the delivery room, screaming at him to leave her alone, the nurse had had to eject him forcibly, and even then he stood as close to the door as he could, both palms planted on the door and sliding with sweat. He couldn’t stand hearing Lee cry like that; and then suddenly he had heard another cry, an astonishing muddy wail, and this time he had pushed his way back in, and this time no one had stopped him.

He went to Lee first, enveloping her pale hand between his two, stroking back her damp tangle of hair, two shades darker with sweat. She turned her face away from his, but not before he saw a rippling of fear.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he turned. “Don’t you want to say hello to your daughter?” Anna said. “A daughter?” Jim said. She laughed at him. Tiny sparklers ignited inside him. The air shimmered past. Anna handed him the baby, and he felt her breath, cool as glass against his hand. Astounded, he began to laugh, hiccuping until Anna clapped him on the back. “Hold your breath,” she suggested.

The nurse gently took his daughter from him. Instantly he felt depleted. “They both need their rest now,” the nurse said.

“I can’t rest,” Jim said.

“Jesus, new dads,” Anna said.

He floated from the hospital, giddy with excitement. It took him almost twenty minutes to make a five-minute drive to his calculus exam because he kept meandering on the road in reverie.

By the time he got to the examination room, it was practically full. There were fifty people, and not one of them had he ever had the time to become friends with. He took a seat at the back and looked around the room at all the somber faces, the sloped shoulders, the lank despair that came from too much coffee and too little studying. He leaned across the aisle to the girl sitting next to him. She had black hair tied back with a velvet cord. Her jeans were spattered with blue paint, and even though it was ninety degrees that day, she was wearing a velvet jacket. He recognized her, but he had no idea what her name was.

“Guess what?” he said so enthusiastically that she glanced over at him, her eyes hooded with suspicion.

“I’m a dad,” he announced, preening.

She lifted up glassy blue eyes to his, “Well,” she said finally. “I’m dead, too,” she said. “All I can do is pray I can somehow fake it.” Frowning, she turned from him.

Jim hummed to himself. He felt invincible, like Superman. Wife and daughter. Baby girl. And then the proctor appeared, and he thought more calmly: calculus.

The exam didn’t worry him. His best subject had always been math. His father had seen to that. When Jim had been a toddler, falling out of his striped shirts and bright shorts, his shoelaces always hanging over his shoes, Jack had taught him his sums with an old wooden cash register he kept on an extra table in the house. Every month Jack stocked it with fifty dollars of different denominations, with shiny new coins it would give Jim a shock of pleasure to touch. Jack propped Jim up on the Yellow Pages and let him work the stubby keys with his baby fingers. Sometimes, when the keys stuck, Jack pressed down on Jim’s fingers with his own. When it hurt, Jim said nothing. “Okay now,” Jack said, pulling out a ten. “I just bought a dozen apples. Green Granny Smiths, at twenty cents a pound. Let’s say I have a pound and a half, I give you this ten. Make me some change,” He waited patiently while Jim stitched up his brow and figured the math in his head, ringing it up tentatively, “Atta boy,” his father said, “Now make me some change.” Jim pulled out bills and change, settling it into his father’s palm. “That’s the way to do it,” Jack said, “Put it in dollars and sense and anyone can be a math wiz.” Jim loved numbers; he loved the look of money: rusted-looking pennies and bright hard dimes falling across his open, willing palms like buckshot. He loved making towers of dimes and quarters, He spent hours fashioning big-winged origami birds out of new dollar bills until his father walloped him one. “That’s not appreciating the value of money,” he said. But Jim knew the value. And with a new baby he’d have to know it even more.

The proctor, tall and thin and expressionless, slid a blue book down on Jim’s desk. A white edge of exam paper showed. “Begin,” the proctor said, and Jim opened the book, glancing at the formulas. Piece of cake. The girl next to him sighed heavily.

He scribbled formulas; he thought about Lee. His parents would embrace her now that they had a granddaughter; they’d maybe embrace him a little more, as well, Jack had never quite forgiven him for running off with Lee, for giving up the family business, The day Lee had turned eighteen, Jim had called his parents, but his father’s anxious voice had cooled and hardened when he found out why Jim had disappeared, why he had taken it upon himself to stay silent. “Protecting that girl was hurting us,” he said. “Or didn’t you see it that way?” Gladys had simply cried, and neither one of them had asked to speak to Lee or referred to her as anything but “that girl.” He had told them about his classes, about his scholarship, and his mother had said, “Imagine that,” and Jack had told him the supermarket would always be waiting for him, that as far as he was concerned, it was still a father-and-son business, even if Jim had to wait until he was forty to admit it. Jim invited them for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, but neither one would come, although Gladys had sent him a present, a hand-knit red sweater tied in a blue ribbon, and nothing at all for Lee. Lee had cried a little, even after she saw all the presents Jim had bought for her, and the next cold morning she had carefully pulled on his mother’s hand-knit sweater and worn it. “It looks pretty on you,” he had said.

His parents might be able to resist Lee, but how could they resist a baby? His father couldn’t. He’d take his granddaughter up and down the aisles of the store, letting her do all the things he couldn’t abide for one moment in anyone else’s baby, Jim’s daughter could tumble boxes into heaps on the floor. Jim’s daughter could have expensive Chinese melons and Australian kiwis as balls. And Gladys would be beside herself, knitting sweaters out of cheap bright yarn, baking enough cookies for half the neighborhood.

“Ten minutes,” the proctor announced. Jim wrote a formula. That night they were going to name their daughter. He had all these ideas written down on snatches of paper. Names so beautiful it hurt you just to say them. Deidre. Christine. Annabelle. Lee, he thought. Lee. He thought that that was a name more beautiful than any of them, a name as beautiful as the woman who bore it.

By six-thirty he was back at the hospital. He rounded the corner into Lee’s room. The bed was unmade, the white sheets pleated back. Two pillows propped lamely against the headboard. “Sweetie,” he said. He peered into the bathroom, Twin white towels were carefully folded over the rungs, In Lee’s closet, her faded blue denim jacket was hung up neatly, buttoned to the throat. Her worn black high-tops lay prone, toe to toe, in the closet.

Maybe she was at the nursery. He had wanted to see her first, alone, before he saw his daughter, but as he got closer to the sound of crying babies, something moved deep inside of him. Lee wasn’t at the glass, but another man was, older than Jim, in a navy blazer and red leather tie. Frowning, the man stared at the babies; he lifted up his keys and jiggled them. “Hey, pumpkin head, over here,” he said. When Jim came and stood beside him, he studied Jim for a moment. “So which one’s yours?” he said pleasantly, and in baffled wonder, Jim stepped back. He hadn’t a clue. He couldn’t remember the same baby he had held in his arms. He scanned the cribs, trying to pin down something familiar, an expression, a shape. “That one,” Jim said, pointing to a baby in the corner. “Oh,” the man said. “Very nice.” And when he lumbered off, Jim immediately beckoned to the nurse. “Archer,” he said.

A baby was lifted up. Second row from the glass. The eyes were puckered shut, the mouth barely an underline in the small pale face. Breath caught, Jim trickled fingers at his daughter’s closed eyes, her silent face. He still didn’t recognize her as anything but a total stranger. He didn’t feel any bonding. Maybe he needed to feel her, skin against skin; maybe it was the glass, the hospital environment. Weakly he rapped at the glass. Her daughter stayed motionless, but a baby in front suddenly stiffened and began to wail.

He made his way back to Lee’s room, nearly colliding with a candy striper. She blushed hotly when she saw him. She was barely five feet, with shellacked hair shored back with a red plastic headband. He never knew what to make of the candy stripers. They made him feel embarrassed; he always checked his fly when he walked past them. He smoothed his fine, flying hair. He heard them whispering when he walked past.

This one whistled, wheeling in the dinner cart, carefully placing a covered steel dish on Lee’s tray. She lifted the cover. “Mmm,” she said. “Cafeteria catburger.” Jim recognized the green string beans, faded from overcooking, the mealy, muggy-smelling potatoes, but he had no idea what the gray paste was in the center of the plate. “What’s the matter with that wife of yours, not being here for food so good?” the candy striper said.

“Where is she?” Jim said.

“Don’t know,” said the girl, wheeling out the cart.

Jim lifted the cover, poking at one of the potatoes with his index finger, lifting it idly into his mouth. As soon as he tasted the grease and the coarse, grainy coating of salt, he was starving. He scooped up a handful more and chewed. He forked up some of the overcooked beans, which still tasted delicious. The room was so silent. He suddenly felt the way he did when he came home from school to find the house empty, Lee still at work. He felt restless, incomplete, and abruptly he clattered the cover back on Lee’s dinner and went to find Lee’s doctor.

Anna, when he found her, was leaning against the soft-drink machine, nursing a diet soda. As soon as she saw him, she straightened. “Where’s Lee?” Jim said.

“I’ve been calling you all afternoon,” Anna said.

“Calling me?” Jim said. “Why? Where’s Lee?”

Anna blinked at him, “She hasn’t been with you, then?” she said. “We thought maybe—”

“Been with me?” Jim said, and inside of him something started to freeze. His stomach hurled. He felt suddenly queasy. “She’s not here?” he said. “Where is she, then?”

“We don’t know,” Anna said.

Jim heard something buzzing in the background, a sudden harsh whine of an insect. “Call the police.”

“Yes,” Anna said, “We intended to.”

Jim stood in a corner of Lee’s hospital room, crowded by the police and hospital officials and nurses and Anna. The detective wasn’t much older than Jim, and he dressed better, in a dark European suit and Italian leather shoes. It unnerved Jim, who was in gray sweats and sneakers, his baby-fine hair threading down into his eyes no matter how many times he swiped it back. Lieutenant Blanwell, he said his name was, and even though he must have known Jim’s name, he asked him to say it again, and when Jim did, his own name sounded like that of a stranger in his mouth.

Jim stiffly watched the detective fingering Lee’s things, touching her clothing, sitting on the edge of the bed, even examining the bathroom floor. The floor was somehow inexplicably damp, and when the detective stood up Jim saw to his satisfaction that the knees of his pants were wet. Annoyed, the detective tried to slap them dry. He rummaged through Lee’s drawer, plucking out the cheap lipsticks and moisturizers. He checked the window. Alongside him, men dusted for prints. One picked up Lee’s water glass with gloved hands and slipped it into a plastic sack. Another pried himself under the bed and pulled out a long tail of blue terrycloth. “That’s from her bathrobe,” Jim said. “The belt.” Blanwell studied it for a moment.

“It’s from her bathrobe,” Jim said again, “Sure, I know,” Blanwell said, and nodded at the cop, who put it in a plastic bag. A woman in a rose-flowered bathrobe wandered by, peering in, and the detective shut the door gently. “Well,” he said. “It doesn’t look like any struggle.”

Jim leaned along the wall, The air narrowed. He suddenly remembered the plot of every bad movie he had ever sat through. Lunatics roaming through hospital wards, slicing off hands, injecting deadly drugs.

Blanwell sat on the red Leatherette chair by the bed and stared at Jim. “So would you say you had a happy marriage?” he said abruptly.

“Jesus Christ, we just had a baby,” Jim said.

“Uh-huh. You have many friends? Who came to visit her beside you?”

“Just me,” Jim said. “She wasn’t really close to anyone else. Not like the way she was with me.” He thought of Lee, giggling and gossiping with all the other waitresses, but not one of them ever calling her.

“Did your wife want this child?” Blanwell asked. “You’re pretty young, the two of you. You didn’t have to get married, did you?”

“Everything was fine,” Jim said.

Lee’s nurse crossed her arms. “She had a right to be fresh, in labor like that,” she said.

Jim’s shirt was pasted along his back. Sweat prickled and beaded, “Why aren’t you asking the hospital about security?” he cried, “Anyone could have come up here.”

“We aren’t a police station,” said one of the hospital officials. “We check on everyone who comes in and out of here, we can’t tend to a single patient.”

“We dusted for prints,” the detective said. “We’ll see what we got.” He looked at Jim. “Anything else you can think of to tell us?”

Jim’s mind buckled.

“Well, you said she was happy,” Blanwell said to him, and this time Jim thought of Lee walking the highway, the first time he had seen her there, She had always come home, always come back to him. “Sure,” he said.

“I’m going to need to talk to you more,” Blanwell said. “You go home, get some sleep. Maybe she’ll call you. Or maybe someone else will. Or maybe she’ll come back here for the baby.”

“I’m taking the baby home,” Jim said, “You think I trust her here?”

“No,” Blanwell said. “You’re not. We’ll have someone watch her, but until we know a little bit more, everyone is suspect.” He tucked his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry.”

“You think I did something with my wife?” Jim said, astonished.

“You think I think you did?” Blanwell said. He stood up. The Leatherette chair had an indentation where he had sat. “So I’ll call you,” he told Jim.

Something had shifted. In cold panic Jim drove back to the house, and the whole time Lee kept slamming up in his mind. She was hidden someplace in the hospital; maybe she had gotten up to take a walk and had ended up fainting in a boiler room no one even thought about anymore. Maybe the hospital had botched something; she was dying on a gurney right now until they could think of a way to cover themselves.

He suddenly thought of this science-fiction magazine Lee had once brought home. Someone had left it at a cafe, and she had picked it up, drawn by the bright lurid cover, an illustration of a blond woman in a torn red dress being sucked into a cavernous black spaceship. Weird Tales, it was called, and the date on it was 1952. The pages were stained and crumbling, turning to tissue. The evening she had brought it home, she sat up reading, chewing one thumbnail ragged. There were stories about hauntings and demons and one particular article, reported as fact, about holes in the universe that were responsible for people disappearing. She had read him bits of it. “Scientists say,” she had begun to read, “Which scientists?” he wanted to know, but she waved his words away with her hands, There were tears in the fabric of life, the magazine said, invisible holes and pockets in the ground that simply swallowed people up. Fathers didn’t drive off and leave families, children weren’t kidnapped. It was simply the fault of a blindly cruel universe. Nobody knew where any of these people went, if they were alive in some parallel universe, or crushed by a sudden new force of gravity, or simply in suspended animation. One scientist swore that when he put his ear to the ground, he could hear whispers, but as soon as he started digging there, the sound stopped.

Now, though, he didn’t think it was so funny. He couldn’t stop thinking of tears in the universe, of Lee’s foot poised and arched like a dancer’s, pointing toward oblivion.

The house didn’t look the same. He had wanted to buy a place, but he had miscalculated his funds, so they had ended up renting a house instead. “It’s just an interim step,” he had told Lee. It was cheap rent, but it was also a house so in need of repairs that Lee had almost refused to live in it at all.

“We can’t raise a baby in an apartment,” he insisted. “And we can’t afford anything better. Not yet.”

He had fallen in love with the house as soon as he saw it, He didn’t mind that there was a large wasp nest in the scrubby front yard or that the first two steps on the porch were rotted through. The damp basement didn’t bother him or the slapdash look of the neighborhood, the dirty tricycles rusting on the street, the shouts and calls of children. He loved the idea of a house, especially with Lee in it.

The first rainfall there, they had had to put one of the two pans they owned in the center of the kitchen floor to catch the drops where the roof leaked. The sound kept them awake. The landlord fixed the roof; Jim spent two muggy weeks trying to fix the front steps himself before he realized he was just making it worse. His fingers were full of splinters. He gave up and paid someone else to do it. “Nothing’s forever,” he told Lee.

As soon as he opened the door, he heard her. She was rustling in the bedroom, changing her clothing. He smelled her. Vanilla and Scotch pines.

He paced from one room to another, all the time feeling that she was somehow following him, hiding. Frantic, he began rummaging through her drawers, lifting out the silk shirt he had bought her for her birthday, the string of jet beads she never wore. He pulled out pots and pans and found, wedged in the back of the cabinet, some of the baby books he had bought. He began pulling the house apart, flinging her dresses into a jumble on the floor, upending her dressers. The house piled up around him. The one room he didn’t touch was the baby’s room, pale yellow with an appliqué of butterflies, eye level to an infant in her crib.

It was nearly four when he stopped. He sat in the middle of the living room, trying to sift things into a kind of order, and then he finally stood, rising up from the mess, and lay across the couch, staring out into the night, terrified. He suddenly wanted to call his parents; he wanted someone else in the house with him, but when he dialed the line rang and rang and didn’t catch. He hadn’t made any other friends close enough to call. He got up, pacing. He didn’t realize just how late it was until he saw that all the other houses were dark, closed off. A big yellow tomcat cried fissures of sound into the stillness. He turned on the couch, then got up abruptly and unlocked the front door. He brought the phone by the couch so he’d hear it as soon as it rang. Come home, he thought. Come home.

He stretched out again, and his eyes rolled into restless sleep. He dreamed. Lee was a nurse, dressed in her waitress uniform, her feet laced into white Keds sneakers. Her yellow hair was smoothed under a starchy cap peaked like a turret. She was carrying a silver tray toward him, moving to some kind of silent beat. She smiled secretively at him. Her thin hips swayed. She nodded, locking her gaze to his. And then she dipped down, lengthening her arms into a stretch to present him with the contents of the tray. And then he saw it. A glossy crimson heart, damp with blood, beating helplessly, making a small, terrified clatter against the polished silver tray.

He bolted awake, tumbling from the couch. Stunned, he peered in the darkness, rearranging shapes into the things he recognized. There was the clock. Over there the bookcase. He stood up and opened the front door, and as he did the neighbor’s yellow cat poised on the railing, eyes dilated with the night, then jumped inside. “Hello to you,” Jim said. He fetched the cat some milk, but it was so sour and cheesy that the cat wouldn’t touch it. In the reflection of the toaster, Jim’s eyes were swollen. The cat prowled for a while and then fussed at the door. “Fine, leave me, then,” Jim said, opening the door and popping the cat out into the night like a cork.

His eyes burned. He slapped out the front door, leaving it open. Thieves wouldn’t get anything worthwhile; a stereo system so terrible he hated to play his albums on it. A TV that flickered and snowed. The same Brownie camera he had taken from Philadelphia the day he and Lee had run away to get married.

He got into the Dodge and began driving, heading for the highway. Four in the morning, and the road was still alive with cars. Where did people go this time of night? He glanced into the cars, but the faces he saw were always unreadable, impassive. He kept glancing alongside the road.

Lee had always been in love with highways. She carried maps in her pocketbook. South Dakota. Wyoming and Tennessee. Sometimes she inked in routes, linking the names of roads she liked with other roads. She had her license, but she told him neither Frank nor Janet trusted her to drive, and she didn’t have money for her own car. Some nights he had let her drive, but it had scared him a little. She was so reckless. She weaved in and out of the roads, she speeded and dared.

Nights when he came home late from class or study group, Lee was sometimes sleeping. Sometimes, though, the house was silent. He worried at first. The notes she sometimes left him were cryptic. Went out, they said. But he didn’t like being in the house without her.

He didn’t know what she was doing at first. Oh, he could imagine all right. Lee drinking Scotch at some seedy bar outside of town. Lee dancing with her head fitted into someone’s shoulder, He drove out looking for her. He checked the Silver Spoon, but she wasn’t there, and the other waitresses gave him such mocking grins that he pretended he was just picking up some cigarettes from the machine, that he knew perfectly well where his wife was. He checked the record stores, winding up and down the aisles, buying a few tapes to keep him company in the car.

She wasn’t at the Dairy Queen or the roller rink; she wasn’t at the bookstore, reading the last pages of all the novels she might want to buy. He was exhausted when he decided to drive home. He didn’t trust himself on the road when he felt this sleepy; besides, he was sure she was home by now, he was certain he’d find her lying on the couch, reading, half-asleep, smiling up at him drowsily.

That night he had been almost home when he first saw her walking along the shoulder of the road. Amazed, he slowed down. She was in jeans and red sneakers, her father’s leather jacket zipped to the throat. She held her head very high, and her hair expanded in the breeze. He got close enough to see her smiling, close enough to beep the horn so that she started, turning toward him, her face white. When she saw him, her smile dissolved. She stood there, the highway lights flickering in a corona about her. He leaned over and opened the door for her. “Get in,” he said, She burrowed sulky hands into her pockets, “Please,” he said. His voice sounded foreign to him. “Please,” he repeated, and then she got in the car and sat beside him. “What’s wrong with my just walking?” she said abruptly.

“I’d like to walk with you,” he said, and instantly regretted it.

“The highway’s dangerous, that’s why,” he said.

Lee rolled down her window so the wind lashed her hair against the pane. She looked out as the car swallowed the miles toward home, “I won’t walk the highways,” she said. “I’ll walk someplace else.”

“The neighborhood’s fine,” he said. “People know you. They’ll watch out, Walk in the neighborhood.”

She was silent. He kept waiting for her to say something to him, to burst into tears so he could loop one arm about her, to rage so they could at least connect in a fight. But when he looked over, he saw she was asleep.

He had carried her into the house that night, laying her into the bed, covering her with the yellow quilt. He bent to kiss her. “Sleeping Beauty,” he said, but she didn’t wake when his lips anointed hers.

She never stopped walking the highways, and he never stopped driving around to find her and bring her back home. He couldn’t think of a single thing to do to make her stop walking the highways. He imagined it was the town she was bored with, and sometimes he imagined it was him, that all his studying made him boring. He dressed up and surprised her with reservations just outside of town. He once bought theater tickets in Washington. She had good enough times. She was flushed with pleasure. He felt a rush of desire for her, but when he reached to touch her, she didn’t react. She was still traveling.

The night Lee disappeared, Jim drove for two hours. The only person he saw on the road was a young hitchhiker, a girl in a blue dress and white cowboy boots with her thumb jabbed out. He drove past her in a rigid fury because she was another one in love with the road, and then half a mile away he thought of her getting into the wrong car, ending up a smear on the highway, and he swerved the car around to go get her. He’d lecture her; he’d scare her with stories Lee had laughed at. Men who scissored victims in their cars and kept the pieces in mason jars in the trunk. White slavers. The highway, smooth and glossy black, was suddenly so completely empty, it astonished him. He stopped the car, sitting perfectly still, waiting, listening, thinking all the time he would sit there forever, if it would bring Lee back.

By morning Lee was already a news item. While shaving, Jim heard about his wife’s disappearance on the news. He stood perfectly still and then slumped onto the edge of the tub. The news announcer didn’t mention anything about Jim being suspect, or that he wasn’t even allowed to take home his own baby. The authorities are still on the case, the announcer said. And then, in a seamless shift, the story was suddenly about a skirmish in the Far East. Casualties were listed.

He was afraid to get up, afraid to go out into the neighborhood. It was still early, not even seven o’clock.

He had to call Frank, to reach him before the police did, Frank had threatened him once, said he would kill him. Lee had sent him two cards, one when she got married, one when she was pregnant, and he hadn’t answered either. Jim’s stomach tightened. He dialed.

“Yes?” Frank’s voice, anxious, slipped on the line.

“It’s Jim,” he blurted. “It’s about Lee.”

“You found her?” he said, his voice speeding up. “I’ve been on long distance with some detective all evening.”

“No, I didn’t find her,” Jim said. “I thought maybe—if she was all right—she’d have called you.”

“Me.” Frank’s voice turned suddenly bitter. “She ran away with you. She’d call you.”

“Please, if you hear anything, will you call me?”

There was silence. “Why didn’t you call me?” Frank said. “Why didn’t you let me know as soon as she was gone? Why do I always have to hear things about my daughter from the police?”

“I’ll call you,” Jim said.

“Yes,” Frank said. “You call me.”

When he hung up, he was sweating. His shirt was pasted to his back. He looked at the clock. Nearly eight, If he hurried, he could get out before the neighborhood started waking up and realizing just what had happened. He wasn’t due at the police station until nine, but when he stumbled in, it was eight-thirty. Bunched under his arm was a small packet of photographs: Lee when they had first run away, Lee in front of the apartment, Lee sitting on the porch of their house. There was Lee pregnant in the freak March heat wave, her hair pulled into a ponytail. He had a few letters, too, samples of her handwriting; he had the marriage license he had almost framed, he had been so excited about it.

They had him talk to a new detective this time, a woman with severely cut brown hair and red glass earrings. She nodded sympathetically at the photos before she tucked them gently into a folder. At one point she told him she would do everything she could to help him. “I lost my husband just last year,” she said, and Jim, surprised, saw that her eyes were starting to tear. “Heart attack. He got up from the table to get coffee and then—well, that was it.” Jim started to reach toward her, to pat her hand in his awkward way, but she suddenly resettled herself on her chair. “Well, it’s different here, isn’t it?” she said. “What else can you tell us?”

There was something oddly safe about being at the police station, telling story after story about Lee. It was a kind of company, talking to someone, and every detail he revealed about Lee made her somehow more real to him, more there. He didn’t tell everything. He didn’t tell about Lee’s walking the highways; he didn’t tell her that he had coerced Lee into marrying him, that he had made it a condition of her freedom. And sometimes he told things that only could have been true. He insisted Lee was crazy to have this baby, that she had even picked out names. He was lost in reverie, he embellished details so lively, he half began to believe they were true. “We were very much in love,” he said. “People used to stop us on the street and comment about it.”

The detective looked at him. “I see,” she said, “Any other person she might have cared for?”

“We loved each other,” Jim said stiffly.

He remembered, months before she had gotten pregnant, how he had felt her interest in him rising. She bought him denim shirts and told him he looked handsome in them. She cut his hair and grinned with him into the mirror when she was finished. “Now you look cool,” she said. Sometimes she would take his arm when they were walking. Sometimes she would give him a kiss for no reason at all. And sometimes, too, in the middle of the night, he would wake to find her slowly massaging his stomach, kissing his thigh, needing him. And then she got pregnant, and just as abruptly as it had flowered, her interest waned. He told himself it was just because she was preoccupied, just because she was scared, When he put his arm around her, she removed it. “I feel too hot,” she said. When he kissed her she pulled away, “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Don’t make me ask you what’s wrong twenty times before you tell me. Save some time and tell me now, why don’t you?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “Everything’s fine.” But he saw how her face was crumpling. “Lee,” he said, “What’s wrong.”

“Nothing,” she told him.

For the first time, then, dressing better, remade by Lee, he began to notice other women’s interest. They smiled when he passed. One woman shyly offered to buy him dinner if he would help her study. And in the library there was his biology lab partner, Linda Lambrose. She was thin and lovely and smart. She smelled of lily of the valley, and she had a mane of curly red hair.

Still, as intoxicated as he was by other women, he had come home for Lee, but the house was empty when he got there. There wasn’t even a note on the table, a scribble telling him where she might be. He felt his heart hardening. He got back in the car and began driving, and he wasn’t even on the highway when he spotted Lee, bundled in an old red sweater of his, walking purposefully down the road. Her hair whipped behind her, and even from a distance he could tell that she was smiling. Furious, he banged the horn at her. He jerked open the door while she blinked at him, slightly dazed, like something caught.

She was pleasant enough in the car. She told him she had gone miniature golfing by herself that night, that she had done well enough to keep the scorecard. She touched his arm as she talked, but her friendliness suddenly irritated him. The car suddenly smelled faintly of lily of the valley, and if he concentrated, he could imagine Linda sitting beside him, one hand lightly on his shoulder.

The calls began that day. Reporters wanting to talk to him, and at first he would. He kept offering rewards, he kept talking about how much in love he was with his wife, but they always referred to him as suspect. “What would be my motive?” he shouted. “You tell me one reason why I’d do something to her. And what would I do? You think she’s buried in the backyard? You think she’s in pieces somewhere? You go and find her, then,” The reporters shrugged. Some looked as if they were considering his requests, and after that he refused to talk to reporters at all.

He thought about not answering the phone at all or about getting a machine, but he kept imagining Lee calling him, hanging up on a machine, and then spinning out into the distance away from him.

That evening his father called. “Why didn’t you call and tell us yourself?” he demanded. “I’m your father. Didn’t you think I’d want to know I was going to be a grandfather? Didn’t you think I’d want to know about all this going on?” His anger coiled across the phone wires. “The police called us,” he said. “I didn’t tell them one damn thing.”

“I called you yesterday,” Jim said. “No one was home. And I was going to tell you about the baby.” He caught his breath. “Oh, hell, they didn’t have to call you,” he said.

“Well, they did, and I kept my mouth shut. I acted like I didn’t even know Lee.”

“You could have said what you wanted,” Jim said.

“Not me, I didn’t,” Jack said.

He wanted to know if Jim was all right, if he needed money. “Your mother wants to know if you want to come home and stay for a while. You know, be in a different place.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “I have to be here.”

“Then we’re coming out there,” Jack said.

He thought of the police wandering around, the newspapers. He thought of his daughter, still in the hospital because he was considered too dangerous to take her. Between his father and him, the lines hummed.

“We want to see our granddaughter,” Jack said. “The police told us we were grandparents. I guess you were too busy to call your own parents.”

“Dad—” he said, “I called,” and his father sighed.

“I know,” Jack said. “And believe me, I’m sorry.”

Gladys was suddenly on the extension, her voice faded. “Baby,” she cried. “What do you need?”

When he started crying, tears across the wires, she made low, soothing sounds in her throat. She waited until he had calmed. “It’ll all be all right,” she said. “You just listen to me. We’re here if you need us. You need money, you need a place to stay, you need one stupid thing, you call us. I don’t care what time it is. I don’t. And anyway we’re coming out there. As soon as I get off the line, I’m calling the airlines. You can’t go through this alone. Listen to me, Lee will be fine. They’ll find her.” She started to cry. “What does my granddaughter look like?” she said suddenly. “Is she pretty? Does she have blue eyes? They do when they’re that young, you know.”

She stopped crying for a moment. “She looks like you,” Jim said.

He waited for his parents, who couldn’t get a flight until the next evening. He kept the radio on, listening to the latest about himself. He bought three newspapers, hoping for news no one was really telling him. He hadn’t made any real friends here, mostly because of Lee and studying and school, and he did his best to avoid the neighbors, but even so he saw how they looked at him when he walked out of the house. He stopped at the police station to see what they were doing to find his wife and then he went to see his daughter.

Most of the nurses were now a little suspicious of him, but he wasn’t so sure he trusted them, either. Any one of them could have been jealous enough to harm Lee. Any one might have accidentally given Lee the wrong medication and then, horrified, tried to cover it up. He stood with the other fathers in front of the glass and hated the nurses because they had more of a right to his baby than he did. It was dangerous. Babies bonded. He didn’t want his baby growing up yearning for the scent of hospital antiseptic, falling in love with the color white, forever straining toward the insidious whisper of crepe shoes on linoleum. He watched the couples holding hands, and it made him feel as if his heart were atrophying, He felt like telling them to just forget it, to not make any plans at all. Half of them would probably get divorced. People got cancer. Kids overdosed. Pain was surprising, an endless joke where you were always the punch line.

It made him afraid for his daughter. He made the nurse bring her over so he could hold her. He sang her lullabies, he told her stories until she dozed in his arms, and when he had to hand her back to the head nurse, his heart felt emptied. Eyes wet, he stood outside the glass and looked at her. The head nurse in the nursery slowly began to soften toward him. She let him come into her office and be with his daughter. She shut the door, and once she brought him coffee and a cheese Danish. “She’s a good baby,” the nurse told him. Her name was Gracie, and she wasn’t much older than Jim, She told Jim his daughter slept most of the time, but sometimes she gravely watched what was going on around her. “It’s as if she’s waiting for something,” she told Jim.

“Can’t I just take her home?” Jim said. “You could pretend to be in the other room, you could not see.”

“They’ll put you in jail,” she said. “Then you might never see her.”

He was silent for a minute. “Listen,” she said. “You go home, get some sleep. You come back and you can sit in here with your baby as long as you like.”

He went home, and before he even picked up his newspaper on the porch, he knew it would have his picture in it. “Suspect Jim Archer,” it said. He bunched it up and chucked it in the trash. When he got inside the phone was ringing. “I know what you did,” a voice whispered. “I saw.”

Jim slammed down the receiver. He dug out the Yellow Pages from under the counter. He’d find a lawyer. But every name he called had already heard of him, and every name wanted a retainer that would clean out his bank account, his future. He didn’t care. He arranged meetings with a few of them and then went to find the bankbook.

He always kept it in the same place. In the bottom of a secret drawer in the rolltop desk. But when he opened the drawer, it wasn’t there. He kept flipping open the other drawers, ferreting about loose papers, clips, and staples, and finally gave up and went to the bank.

The teller he spoke to was a young girl with curly dark hair and stiff lacquered lashes. She didn’t flinch when she heard his name. Illiterate, he thought with relief. Doesn’t watch the news. She disappeared for a moment, and when she came back she blinked at Jim. “Mr. Archer,” she said, “this account’s only got twenty dollars in it.”

“What are you talking about, twenty dollars?” Jim said, Something curled in his stomach.

She shrugged. She showed him the paper with the stamp across it. Five thousand dollars removed, gone as easily as a breath. “I didn’t take that much money out,” Jim said.

“You did too,” she insisted. “Anyway, your wife did. Look, here it is. Here’s the date. The signature.” Jim stared down at the paper, at Lee’s rolling hand.

“Something wrong?” she said.

“Can I get a copy of this?” he said, trying to still the quake in his voice. He waited, impatient, and then gripped the copy from under the glass divider.

He fairly lurched out of the bank, his heart clipping. Out in the bright sunlight, he was suddenly overwhelmed. He kept seeing it—Lee’s name, deliberately branded across the page, erasing the account and him, too, along with it.

He could walk to the police station from here. He could smack this on their desk and take his daughter home, and there was no longer any reason anyone would stop him.