Fortune's Daughter: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  “What business?” Rae said.

  “I got lucky for once,” Jessup said. “It’s an estate sale. Some old guy died and his family is selling the property cheap. Three thousand dollars up front for me, and three thousand for my buddy.”

  Rae had never heard him call anyone his buddy. She thought of the four thousand they had saved and her mouth tightened.

  “You didn’t ask me how I’ve been feeling,” Rae said.

  “You didn’t give me a chance,” Jessup actually had the nerve to say.

  Rae picked up the carton of milk and threw it at him. He hadn’t expected it so he didn’t even try to duck. The carton hit him on the shoulder and milk poured down his shirt.

  “Oh, Christ,” Jessup said. He jumped up and wiped off his shirt. “It doesn’t take much to get you hysterical these days, does it?”

  Rae realized that she was exhausted. She reached for her glass of milk and finished it, wondering if they were having some kind of divorce here.

  “There are plenty of things you didn’t ask me,” Jessup said. “Like what kind of business I’m considering.” When Rae didn’t ask, he told her anyway—it was forty acres with a trailer and a barn. “You know why the barn’s there?” Jessup grinned.

  Rae couldn’t even begin to guess. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’m going to be raising horses.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. When they had first run away together Rae had found a cabin for rent in Maryland, but, when Jessup had come to look at it, all he had to do was hear the squirrels running back and forth inside the attic walls and he’d fled. They had rented the garden apartment in Silver Spring instead.

  “Laugh,” Jessup said. “But they’re not any old horses. They’re midget horses,” he informed her.

  Rae let out a shriek that was so piercing Jessup ran over to her. It took a few seconds before he realized that she was hysterical with laughter. He shook his head and poured himself another cup of coffee and glared at her. He watched her, waiting for her to stop, but every time Rae even thought the words midget horses she burst out laughing all over again.

  “Go ahead,” Jessup told her. “But you’ll take me seriously when I’m rich.”

  Rae wiped the tears from her eyes and instantly felt sober. He actually believed in this.

  “I swear to God, Rae,” Jessup said, “they’re no bigger than Saint Bernards.”

  He spooned sugar into his coffee.

  “I need this ranch,” he said.

  Now she knew exactly why he’d come back. “Not on your life,” Rae said.

  “Look, you took the car, now let me have the bankbook.”

  “I would rather give that bankbook to a total stranger than give it to you,” Rae said. “I’d tear it in half first.”

  “You won’t give me an inch,” Jessup said.

  “I gave you a little more than that,” Rae said. “Like, try everything. I was in love with you.”

  “Was?” Jessup said. He came up behind her and put his arms around her.

  “Cut it out,” Rae said. “I really mean it.”

  “I could stay here tonight,” Jessup said.

  Having his arms around her reminded her that the room was much too hot. She stood up and turned off the oven. “I don’t want to pay the gas bills to dry your jacket,” she said.

  They stood facing each other. It was getting dark, but neither of them went to turn on a light. There was still a puddle of milk on the floor, Jessup hadn’t bothered with it when he cleaned off his shirt, and the milk looked blue, as if someone had spilled a bottle of ink. Rae could feel the baby shift, and she put one hand against her ribs.

  “I could stay,” Jessup said.

  Rae shook her head. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him until he turned away, then she watched as he rinsed out his coffee cup and put on his denim jacket.

  “I guess I’ll take the bus back,” Jessup said.

  “I guess you will,” Rae shrugged.

  You couldn’t see a thing out the kitchen window, but Rae could tell from the sound of the rain—it was bad weather for taking the bus back to Barstow, alone.

  “I don’t want there to be any bad feelings,” Jessup said.

  “Why should there be?” Rae said. “Because you care more about some horses than you do about your own child?”

  “It’s all in my head,” Jessup said. “Nothing that’s happened lately has anything to do with you.”

  “Nothing you’ve ever done has had anything to do with me,” Rae said.

  “You’re wrong about that,” Jessup told her, and after he’d left she almost believed him. On some of those days when he stood outside her parents’ house, it was so cold even Jessup must have felt it. When she couldn’t manage to get out of the house she could see him from her bedroom window, waiting for hours. She couldn’t help but think of him there on the bus back to the desert; his legs were so long he’d have to stretch them out in the aisle and he wouldn’t get to Barstow until after midnight. In all the years they spent together Rae had believed that if she just kept working at it, she could keep him. But she just didn’t want to work that hard any more.

  That night she didn’t have any trouble sleeping: her bed seemed softer than usual and the rain continued till dawn. In the morning, Rae cleaned the milk off the floor and washed out the coffeepot. But she didn’t open the drawer in the kitchen and reach beneath the silverware until two weeks later. She felt like a total fool to just be discovering that the whole time he’d been sitting there with her he’d already had their bankbook in the pocket of his denim jacket, and that his asking had only been a formality—he’d planned to leave her with nothing at all from the start.

  When Rae didn’t call back Lila felt herself grow more and more anxious. She wanted to hear for herself that their bargain was sealed, she wanted to know the exact hour of the day when Jessup had come back. Rae’s unborn child had begun to haunt Lila: in the shop she thought about foolish things—baby smocks with pearl buttons, tiny silver spoons, bibs embroidered with lace—and each time she added up the columns of figures in the books she added wrong and charged Richard’s customers too little or too much. At night she dreamed of stillborn babies whose fingers and toes were as cold as ice. But what terrified Lila most was that there were actually times when she found herself making a list of names, as if this baby was hers.

  If she was wrong—if Rae’s boyfriend didn’t return—Lila knew that she wouldn’t keep her part of the bargain. Every day she waited for the phone call that would release her, but the call never came. Richard could tell how upset she was; he asked so often what was wrong that finally Lila told him. But Richard didn’t understand; he thought Lila would make a wonderful labor coach, he urged her to keep her promise to Rae. His praise only drove Lila away from him, and it made her realize that if you haven’t told someone the truth for a long enough time, after a while you can’t tell him anything at all and expect him to understand.

  So many days went by that Lila began to wonder if perhaps she was free of Rae at last. But then one night, as she was washing the dishes after supper, Lila closed her eyes for a moment and saw a tall man sitting in the very last row of a bus, his head tilted back so he could sleep. It seemed to be very late at night and the sky above the road was so clear Lila could see the Milky Way. Lila turned the water off in the sink and went to sit down. When Richard saw the look on her face, he dropped the magazine he’d been reading and sat up straight in his chair. Lila looked up at him; her eyes were so dark it was impossible to tell their true color.

  “I’ve just seen something,” Lila said.

  Richard tried to get her to explain, but she wouldn’t. He thought what she had seen was the problem, but that wasn’t it. It was the fact that she had seen anything at all. It was simply that on this night Lila knew that she could find out things she didn’t want to know. And she could feel it—it wasn’t the future she was seeing, but the past, and she grew so frightened that she couldn’t eve
n go back into the kitchen alone, she had to ask Richard to walk in there with her and hold her hand.

  They finished the dishes together, but Lila wouldn’t talk to Richard, and later when he said he was going to bed she didn’t seem to hear him. He stood in the doorway, waiting; when he called her name sharply, the way you call to people you can’t seem to waken, Lila told him to go on without her. And as Richard walked down the hallway he had the distinct impression that it was Lila who was walking away from him, even though she was still in the kitchen, staring out into the yard.

  When Richard got into bed, Lila could hear the springs creak; the light from the crack under the bedroom door disappeared as he turned off the lamp. Lila called Rae at a little after eleven. Rae had already been asleep for an hour, and her voice was thick, but Lila could tell, right away, that Rae had been sleeping alone. She didn’t whisper the way she would have if her boyfriend had been there with her. You could hear the raw sound of betrayal in her tone.

  “He came back all right,” Rae told Lila. “Only he left that same night, and he took all my money with him.”

  “How could you let him do that to you?” Lila said.

  “I didn’t let him!” Rae said. “He just took my bankbook and left.”

  Lila sat down in a kitchen chair. She intended to tell Rae that she couldn’t go through with it—Rae would have to find another labor coach. But out of the blue she started thinking about names again, and the most beautiful of the names—Catherine and Jessica and Claire—made her feel like weeping.

  “You think I should go after him and get that money back, don’t you?” Rae said.

  “I don’t know,” Lila said. She felt dizzy, she really didn’t feel very well at all.

  “You know, you’re right,” Rae said admiringly. “I let him get away with everything, but I’m not going to do it this time.”

  After she’d hung up the phone, Lila put some water up to boil. She needed something comforting and plain: a packaged teabag, two spoons of sugar, a chipped blue cup and saucer. As Lila poured the water in, the teabag split apart, and she had to wait for the tea leaves to settle before she could drink. She sipped the tea slowly and listened as the rain began. At first there were only a few hard drops hitting the highest leaves in the lemon tree, and then it came down faster. The weeds on Three Sisters Street had gone wild this winter; each time it rained they crept farther into the vegetable patches, they wound themselves around the chain-link fences and around the lowest telephone wires. Tonight, the birds in the trees shivered, and husbands and wives turned to each other in bed beneath extra blankets and quilts. It was the kind of night when no one should be up past midnight, alone in the kitchen.

  Lila had finished only half the cup when she realized that there was something wrong with the tea. It left a strange aftertaste in her mouth; her tongue was coated and numb. When she looked down into the cup, the outline of a child was already forming. Lila ran to the sink and spilled out the tea. She stayed there, leaning against the sink for balance. The rain was coming down harder than ever, but Lila couldn’t hear its echo on the roof or in the rain gutters. She suddenly knew exactly what she wanted; she didn’t even have to think about it, she felt it the way a mother feels her baby’s cries somewhere just beneath her skin. It seemed so simple now, she could hardly believe she had waited this long. She was going back to get her daughter, and before the rain slowed down, before the moon returned to the center of the sky, Lila went into the bedroom, and she quietly dragged her suitcase out of the closet and packed nearly all her clothes.

  That night Richard dreamed of his mother. She was in the parlor of the old house in East China, with her hands in front of her face, weeping. Somehow, sparrows had gotten into the house; they flew everywhere and got tangled up in the drapes. There was nothing Helen could do to help them; she could only watch as more and more were caught in the heavy fabric, trapped inside billows of linen. As Richard dreamed, Lila packed her suitcase. Then she left the bedroom and closed the door behind her. She put her suitcase in the front hallway and went to make coffee. At exactly three a.m. the birds outside began to sing, and Lila went to the window. But already she was seeing only the things she imagined her daughter saw: bare white birch trees, a thin layer of ice smoothly covering the cement, the morning star in the east.

  She was still thinking about her daughter when Richard woke up in the morning and found she wasn’t in bed. He went into the living room. Lila was sitting on the couch; her coat was draped over the rocking chair. Richard sat down next to her, but instead of taking her hand he kept his own hands folded in his lap.

  “What’s happening to us?” Richard said.

  Lila knew she should have told him the day she met him, or the night before they got married. She should have asked him to take a walk with her on the East China Highway or told him in the car on the way to California. There were a half dozen times when she nearly begged him to turn back to New York—every time they saw a little girl, in the back seat of a car, at the counter of Howard Johnson’s, on a billboard high above the interstate. On each anniversary, during every full moon she could have told him. But all of those chances slipped away, just as this one was slipping away from them now.

  Lila turned to him and rested her head against his shoulder. Richard was wearing a blue bathrobe that Lila had given him for his birthday one year. He began to stroke Lila’s hair, and each time he did Lila held him a little tighter. But by the time the blackbirds in the yard had flown to the highest branches of the lemon tree, Lila had missed another chance completely. All the way to the airport, in the back seat of the taxi, she kept one arm on her suitcase and thought about the way he’d asked her, at the very last minute, not to go. He never asked why she was leaving, just asked her not to go. After the taxi dropped her off, Lila stopped thinking about Richard, and, after all, she had to. Once the jet had taken off, it didn’t really matter if she missed him or not: in less than six hours she’d be back in New York.

  It took Rae three full days to track him down, and at the end of that time she felt as though she could commit murder. It had been bad from the start—when she drove out to Barstow there were dead animals all over the road: snapping turtles with their shells cracked open, lost dogs, hawks with wingspans of nearly two feet. Every time she passed something dead on the road, Rae closed her eyes and pressed her foot down harder on the accelerator. Then, when she got into town, she found he wasn’t listed in the phone book, and she had to waste forty dollars on two nights at a motel where the lumpy mattress made sleeping impossible.

  He didn’t have a box at the post office, and there wasn’t a car registered in his name at the Department of Motor Vehicles. It was almost as if he had never existed. By the third day Rae had just about given up hope of ever finding him again when she heard a waitress mention his name at Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Is that my Jessup you’re talking about?” Rae said without thinking.

  The waitress turned from her friend and looked Rae up and down; even when she was seated anyone could tell Rae was pregnant.

  “I don’t know,” the waitress said carefully. She was eighteen years old and she had the feeling that she might have gone out with a married man. “It’s the Jessup that took me out to dinner last Saturday night.”

  “How many of them do you think there can be?” Rae said.

  “One,” the waitress agreed.

  It didn’t take much to talk the waitress into divulging Jessup’s Hesperia address, and once she’d gone that far the waitress went on to give Rae exact directions, writing them down on the back of a paper napkin.

  On the drive over the hills Rae saw two coyotes turning over crushed turtles with their paws, inspecting the shells passively. It was night when she finally got to Hesperia, and she had to pull over and switch on the light so that she could study the directions. For a while she thought she was lost, but after another twenty minutes of driving in the dark she knew she had found the right place—she saw a flash of silver
. Jessup’s trailer. She pulled the Oldsmobile off the road, then cut the lights and headed down the long dirt driveway. It was so quiet that she felt herself straining to hear something. There was an old Ford convertible parked near the trailer, and Rae thought bitterly, Jessup’s buddy’s car. She parked and turned the key in the ignition, and when her eyes adjusted to the dark she made out Montana license plates on the Ford; she could see a row of shovels and hoes leaning against the trailer, and Jessup’s old leather boots, the ones she’d bought him, caked with mud, set out on the porch.

  A huge antenna was balanced over the trailer, but the air out here had to be too thin for TV frequencies, and when Rae turned on her radio to find out the time, all she got was static. Whatever time it was, it felt late. The lights in the trailer were out, and anyone could tell that whoever was inside was already asleep. Still, when Rae listened carefully she could hear noises. Beyond a small barn was a corral; Rae leaned toward the windshield and narrowed her eyes to see the horses. Jessup was right, they weren’t any bigger than dogs, but somehow that didn’t seem funny now. They moved in a group along the wooden fence, restless, raising a thin layer of dust. Rae found herself wondering what would happen if somebody opened the gate for them. Probably they would race toward the hills and you’d be able to hear them for miles as they moved like one dark creature, the sound of their hoofs steady in the night.

  After two nights of not sleeping well, she just couldn’t face Jessup yet. While she was deciding on the best place to look for a motel for the night she fell asleep behind the wheel, and it was Jessup’s partner, Hal, who found her when he went out to feed the horses at five thirty the next morning. He hadn’t had his coffee yet, and it was still dark, so he didn’t notice the parked Oldsmobile until after he’d dragged the bales of hay out of the barn. The horses were waiting impatiently at the gate; Jessup had shut off the alarm clock and turned over, leaving everything to Hal, just as he did every morning. A stranger’s parked car just meant one more thing for Hal to attend to while Jessup slept, but when he walked over and saw it was only a woman asleep, he couldn’t wake her. He went to feed the horses, and it was the sound of their running to greet him that woke Rae. She knew right away she shouldn’t have slept in the car: her legs were riddled with cramps and her ribs hurt, as if the baby had been pressing against them all night long. When she got out of the car she stamped her feet; it was much colder than she’d expected and she wrapped her arms around herself. She went over to the corral, leaned against it, and watched Hal drag the hay inside. The air smelled like peaches, but it was cold enough to give you goosebumps.