Fortune's Daughter: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  This dog’s tail was up, and she knew that wasn’t a good sign. She could feel something sour in her mouth, and she wondered how a pregnant person could possibly be given rabies shots. Inside her the baby moved; when it turned on its side like that it was almost as if there was a wave trapped within her.

  “I’m going to keep walking,” Rae said to the dog. It was close enough so that she could feel the heat of its body. “I want you to stay,” she told it.

  Her legs were shaking, and maybe that was why it seemed to take such a long time to get to the front door. As soon as she heard the lock click she pushed the door open and ran inside. She stood there with her back to the door, shivering. Then she put the bag of Chinese food down on the bed and went to the kitchen window. The dog was still out there, in the exact place where she’d told it to stay. It looked around, confused; if it had come down from the canyons during the heat wave last summer it had spent the last months hiding, coming out at night to turn over garbage cans and search for water in birdbaths and gutters. But someone had once trained this dog well and it was compelled to obey Rae’s command. It might have stood out in the courtyard all night if Rae hadn’t filled a plate with fried rice and eggrolls and opened the door to call to it.

  It was a female, and not quite as vicious as it had first seemed. It watched Rae, puzzled, but when she closed the front door, it ran to the food and devoured it. Rae sat in the easy chair and ate the rest of the food out of the containers; later, when she went into the kitchen to boil water for tea, she looked out the window and saw that the dog was still out there, curled up on her doorstep. That night, Rae took her embroidery into bed with her and she used a cross-stitch and red thread to make a border of hearts along the hem of a baby blanket. Through the locked front door she could hear the dog breathe in its sleep, long easy intakes of air that sounded like sighs. It was amazing how the sound of another creature’s breathing could get into your dreams and bind you together. In the morning Rae set a bowl of milk outside her front door, and after a little while she found the courage to reach down and pat the stray dog as it drank.

  The next morning she took the dog in for a rabies vaccination and bought it a collar and leash. She walked the dog three times a day. Her doctor agreed that it was good exercise, but she also suggested that it was time to start taking it easy, maybe time to stop working.

  When Rae went to visit Lila, the dog climbed into the car and insisted on going with her. She left it tied to the garage door. Lila was crankier than usual, and after a while Rae gave up trying to read to her. At a quarter to five Rae went into the kitchen; she washed out some cups and cleaned the counter with a paper towel. When Lila heard the front door open she thought Rae had left, and she sat up in bed, frightened at being alone. But Rae had only gone out with a bowl of cold water for the dog. She came back and rinsed out the bowl, then stood in the doorway to Lila’s room.

  “Didn’t you leave yet?” Lila said.

  “Not yet,” Rae said. “But I guess I won’t be coming back any more.”

  Lila reached for the remote control and snapped on the TV.

  “My doctor wants me to take it easy,” Rae said. “It makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with my baby,” she blurted.

  “Of course there isn’t,” Lila said. “They tell everybody to relax in the last weeks.”

  “Yeah,” Rae said, unconvinced.

  Outside the dog looked mournfully at the front door and then began to bark.

  “Sounds like a big dog you’ve got,” Lila said. She just couldn’t bring herself to look at Rae.

  “I’m scared,” Rae said.

  Even if Lila had tried there was no way for her to tell Rae just how much agony giving birth would be or how, in an instant, the pain would be so forgotten that it wouldn’t even be like a dream, but more like a dream someone else had had. It was easier, of course, when you had someone there beside you to remind you how quickly it would all be over, how much you stood to gain: one child who reached out for you even before it opened its eyes.

  Rae stood where she was in the doorway, and Lila knew that if she took one more step it would be impossible to turn her away. She wouldn’t even want to. Rae held her car keys in her hand; the metal bit into her fingers until she couldn’t stand it. Then she let go. She walked over to the bed, and together she and Lila listened to the dog outside, tied to the garage door, barking.

  “I’m really, really scared,” Rae whispered.

  Lila leaned over and touched her hand. “Don’t be scared,” she said.

  Each day Lila was able to get out of bed for a little while longer. Richard went back to work full time, and the doctors told Lila that her recovery was complete. But she still felt unsteady, as though bedrest had softened her bones. And she still couldn’t bring herself to open the dresser drawer—it had been shut tight for nine days in a row—although sometimes she heard a rustling sound among her nightgowns.

  Early one afternoon, when Lila went into the kitchen to make herself some tea, she looked out the window and noticed that all the birds in the yard had suddenly taken flight. For a moment the sky was filled with birds, and feathers fell to the ground in backyards and vacant lots all over Hollywood. When the birds disappeared the sky was still and gray. Everything was much too silent; Lila could hear a lemon as it fell from the tree and rolled across the patio.

  Richard hadn’t bothered to replace the teapot Lila had burnt when she first got back from New York, so she filled a saucepan and set it on the stove. As soon as Lila lit the flame the water in the pan appeared to be boiling. The water bubbled and swirled in a circle, first to the left, then to the right. Without thinking, Lila stuck her finger into the water to test it, and she would have been much less shocked to have burnt herself than she was when she discovered that the water was ice cold. It was then Lila knew that this was an earthquake. Tremors had begun to move up through the earth, through the foundation and the linoleum floor right through her bones. Lila held on to the countertop as the kitchen floor shifted. Dishes rolled out of cabinets, spices fell from their rack, glasses in the sink broke without being touched. A hot wind blew in through the open window, scorching the curtains, burning Lila’s face. The lemon tree in the yard fell over, but it wasn’t until it hit the ground that Lila realized the wrenching sound she had heard a moment earlier hadn’t been thunder but roots being torn from the ground.

  Richard was in a panic to get home; he left his mechanics to sweep up the broken glass, got into his car, and took off, leaving a hot trail of rubber behind him. It should have taken fifteen minutes to get home, but it was over an hour—the roads were jammed with traffic, and all over the freeways and side streets there were hundreds of frogs no one had even known existed until now when they fled from sewers and aqueducts. Richard pulled into the driveway so fast that he missed the asphalt and the tires tore up the lawn. He looked for her first in the bedroom. The mattress was tilted off the bed and the lamps had overturned and fallen to the floor. The house was so silent that Richard could hear his own pulse. He found that he could still feel some of the same fears he’d had as a boy, when the woods just behind the house seemed too dangerous and dark. As he looked into the empty bedroom, Richard had a sudden longing for his father. It seemed that everything he had ever done he’d done with his father in mind—not the old man back in East China, whose health and unpaid bills he worried about, but the man who’d seemed taller than everyone else. It was possible, Richard knew, to be away from home too long, to forget all the things you once knew by heart. He didn’t want just his father, he wanted the boy he used to be, someone who could be comforted by the sound of his parents talking in the next room, someone who refused to come into the house for supper until after dusk because that was the hour when deer mysteriously appeared in the driveway.

  He found Lila in the kitchen, and he felt as if he had never needed her quite as much. She was staring at her wind-burned hands, puzzled, and as soon as she saw him she lifted up her hands so t
hat she seemed to be asking for help. Richard led her back to bed, then got some vinegar to cool off her burns.

  “It’s a good thing you weren’t in bed,” Richard said. “You would have wound up on the floor.”

  He got a handkerchief and Lila watched him fold it into quarters and pour out some vinegar. When he dabbed her skin the vinegar was so cool that she shuddered.

  “I think I’d better start by cleaning up the kitchen,” Richard said. He recapped the vinegar bottle and started to go, but Lila put her hand on his arm and stopped him. When he got into bed beside her Lila knew that it was possible to love two people best, and when he put his arms around her both of them could imagine that they were in the bedroom of his parents’ house in East China, and that it was the time when orange lilies bloomed right outside the kitchen door, and without even trying to, they both fell in love all over again.

  Later they learned that Los Angeles had felt only the outside circle of the earthquake. Its center was miles away, in the desert, and there the tremors were so strong they could lift a trailer right into the air and leave it lying on its side.

  Rae was at work when the earthquake struck and immediately she thought: Jessup. It was her last day at the office, and Freddy had called her in after lunch. Rae assumed she was about to be fired. At least, she’d thought, he’d had the decency to wait long enough so that her hospital bills would be covered by the health insurance.

  “Guess what?” Freddy said after she sat down on the couch and put up her feet on the coffee table. “Six theaters want to show something called Eugenie—which they tell me I own.”

  “Really?” Rae said innocently.

  “I trusted you,” Freddy said.

  “I swear to God I don’t know what made me do it,” Rae told him.

  She’d been so preoccupied, taking the dog for walks three times a day, getting the apartment ready, talking to Lila every morning on the phone for an hour, that she’d nearly forgotten she’d forged his name.

  “It won best picture in Germany,” Freddy told her.

  “Eugenie?” Rae said.

  “Lucky for you,” Freddy said. “If luck’s what it was.”

  Rae had to ask him to repeat himself when he told her he wanted her to come back after the baby, not as his secretary but as his assistant.

  “Are you trying to squeeze more money out of me?” Freddy said.

  “I’m not sure I heard you right,” Rae said. “What did you say?”

  “All right!” Freddy said. “You’ll get a raise, but it won’t be much at first.”

  He reached for a bottle of wine to celebrate with and was opening it when the tremors began. The steel girders in the building began to vibrate, the file cabinets all tilted to the right. Rae sat up straight: she imagined Jessup trapped in the trailer, pinned underneath furniture that couldn’t be moved. Freddy held the wine bottle in the air and tried to dodge the spray of rose. Afterward, they stared at each other.

  “Did that just happen?” Freddy said.

  They left the building together, by the rear stairway, and then, along with nearly everyone else in the city, they went home to see how much damage had been done. Rae could hear the dog howling inside her apartment as soon as she got out of her car, but when she unlocked her front door the dog was nowhere in sight. A framed print had fallen off the wall, and the glass had shattered and left shards in the bed; the blue-and-white dishes they had bought in Maryland had fallen out of the cupboards and cracked. Rae looked under the bed and in the front closet; she could still hear the howling, as if the sound had been trapped in the walls. The dog was in the bathroom, huddled in the tub. A long time ago, when they had lived in Florida, Rae had bought glass canisters of bath salts that had been so expensive she’d never been able to bring herself to use them. Now the bath salts were spilled in the tub, and the dog had left pawprints in the orange and blue crystals. Rae grabbed hold of the dog’s new collar and helped it out of the tub. It sat obediently on the tiled floor, still shivering, as she toweled off the bath salts that clung to its fur. She had always begged Carolyn for a dog, but after lengthy discussions with Rae’s father, the decision had always been no. It wasn’t that Carolyn didn’t like dogs, she did; on Saturday afternoons she and Rae often drove out to kennels in Concord to look at litters of golden retrievers and spaniels. But Rae and Carolyn both knew that in their house a dog was out of the question. One argument over fleas or chewed-up shoes would be enough to disrupt a peace as fragile as theirs.

  Two weeks after they ran away to Maryland, Rae went out and got a puppy, but it turned out that Jessup hated dogs. They were all right if they served a purpose—a guard dog or a sheepdog was fine—but spending his paycheck to keep a poodle in dog chow was out of the question. It wasn’t a poodle, just a mixed breed, but Rae didn’t bother to correct Jessup. She stood out on the curb as he lifted the puppy into the back seat of the Oldsmobile, and while Jessup drove back out to the animal shelter, Rae threw out the plastic water dish and the five-pound bag of dog food she had bought that morning.

  Now she was the one who wasn’t so sure she wanted the responsibility of a dog, even one that was used to no attention at all. When the phone rang, Rae told the dog to stay in the bathroom, and she ran to answer, hoping that it was Jessup calling to tell her he was all right. But it was only Richard, checking up on her—Lila had told him that a change in the atmosphere could bring on an early labor. Rae assured him that she was fine. But all over the city things had started to go wrong. Everyone said it was the earthquake; it disrupted atoms in the air, bringing out the worst you had hidden inside. The newspapers were already reporting several knife fights—each time a suspect was picked up and questioned about how the fight had begun he always looked sheepish and didn’t seem to know. The supermarket where Rae shopped was held up at gunpoint, and in a parking lot behind the drugstore a young girl was beaten and left unconscious just beyond the spot where the asphalt had buckled. There was still a trace of that hot wind, and everyone had the jitters—when you drank a glass of cold water you were likely to spill it.

  Rae didn’t bother to clean up the apartment, she sat on the bed, hoping that Jessup would phone. The phone did ring late in the evening, but it wasn’t Jessup, it was Hal, phoning from the interstate on his way back to Montana. They had lost everything. Hal had been out in the barn, Jessup inside the trailer, taking a nap. Earthquake weather had just sort of sneaked up on everyone, even the buzzards and the hawks were taken by surprise and some of them were tossed nearly half a mile from their nests. The bunkbed had overturned on top of Jessup, and after he’d gotten out from under it, he’d kicked down the door to the trailer and climbed outside. Hal watched from the doorway of the barn as Jessup ran toward the corral, but it was too late. Anyone could have told him that. They’d never rebuilt it, and the wooden fence had split in two. Horses ran through the opening, the herd so close together it seemed like one animal. As the earth shifted, the sand moved like water, the wind was getting hotter all the time, and you could hear wind chimes in the distance, rattling like mad. Jessup had run over to the corral so fast that he had to bend over, low to the ground, just to catch his breath. By the time he stood back up, the horses were running toward the mountains, a trail of sand rising up behind them like a white wall.

  Hal and Jessup had just stood there for a while, then Hal had gone into the trailer to see what he could salvage. As he picked through the mess Hal heard the engine of the pickup start, and when he came out, holding an armful of laundry, he saw Jessup driving away from the ranch at top speed. Hal filled the trunk of his car with everything he owned that hadn’t been broken or ruined; then he drove into town. He’d managed to talk the sheriff into letting him go up in one of the helicopters searching for missing livestock.

  From the air they could see cracks in the earth, and to Hal it seemed that those cracks were already filling with sand. In no time it would seem as if the earthquake had never even happened. There were a few cows and sheep up in the mo
untains, stumbling along the unfamiliar territory, and Hal found himself wondering if their horses had ever existed, that’s how absolute their disappearance was, not one hoofprint, not one hair from a tail or a mane. There was no chance that the state emergency fund would reimburse them for the lost horses. Jessup had had his own ideas about tax evasion, so they’d listed their stock with the authorities as six horses rather than thirty. Hal was heading back home, and if he ever found anyone stupid enough to buy the land, he’d send Rae a check for half.

  “And the thing that really gets me about Jessup,” Hal told her, “is that he didn’t see me standing behind him. He didn’t even stop to find out whether or not I’d broken my neck. He just took off.”

  After she hung up the phone, Rae cleaned up the worst of the mess in the apartment. She had forgotten about dinner, so now she opened up two cans of tuna—one for herself, the other for the dog. She called to the dog sharply, but when it came into the kitchen she patted its head, and they ate dinner together and then went for a walk around the block. Outside you could hear buzz saws all over the city as road crews began to remove the fallen trees and telephone poles. In the distance there was the sound of sirens, and once the dog startled Rae by throwing back its head and howling along with an ambulance. They walked around the block slowly; the air turned foggy and thick now that the hot wind from the earthquake had settled down; the ground was steaming.

  When they got back to the courtyard the dog turned toward the street and barked, and Rae looked behind her. For a moment she thought she saw a pickup truck, parked near the entrance to the apartment complex. The fog had grown so thick that Rae couldn’t see any farther than the forgotten strand of Christmas lights stretched across the dark courtyard; tonight they were as disconcerting as fallen stars. The dog headed to the apartment, and Rae followed. Once they were inside, she double-locked the door.