Fortune's Daughter

by Alice Hoffman

  Each time she closed her eyes Lila could see the blue inlets of Connecticut that her daughter must have seen when they first brought her out to Long Island. At night her daughter heard gulls overhead, and in the summertime mimosas grew outside her bedroom window. At the far end of the hallway, in a room where there was a double bed and heavy pine furniture, the people who claimed to be her parents slept, never guessing that in her small white room Lila’s daughter closed the door and dreamed about her real mother.

  In the morning, when the smell of bacon filtered through the house and they called upstairs to her, Lila’s daughter was still dreaming: somewhere there was a woman with blue eyes who had to brush her hair a hundred strokes each night, just as she did, so that the knots would untangle. She was always polite to them at breakfast, but they could tell she wasn’t really with them. On days when there were snowstorms or when she had the flu, she felt particularly trapped—the couple at the far end of the hallway became, momentarily, her keepers. But all she had to do was look up into a night that was filled with stars and she knew that she was leaving them: in her mind she was already with her true mother.

  When they finally sat her down in the living room to tell her that she’d been adopted she nodded and smiled; she didn’t want to hurt them by telling them she had always known she wasn’t theirs. She just continued to do what she’d done all along: wait for her mother to appear. On the day of her high-school graduation, on her wedding day, on the morning after the birth of her first child, she waited. Soon she had another child, and her son and daughter were so talented they could swim like fish and recite the alphabet backward before their second birthdays, and when you held them their skin gave off the scent of oranges. On dark nights she kept a candle in the front window and she had her husband put a spotlight up over the garage so that the path to their house was well lit. Every year on Mother’s Day she sat out on the front porch, even when it was pouring rain, and she waited for her mother until long after dark, still hoping that this might be the day.

  When they were reunited Lila would give her daughter everything she hadn’t been able to before. She bought a cashmere sweater at Lord & Taylor, a silk scarf at Bloomingdale’s, a pair of small opal earrings at a jewelry shop on Madison Avenue. She kept writing checks and didn’t even bother to enter the amounts on the stubs, and at night she sat on the floor in her hotel room and carefully wrapped each gift in imported wrapping paper that was so delicate it shredded if you unfolded it too quickly. Only on the day of her doctor’s appointment did she begin to feel a sense of dread. She was in the shower, with the water turned on very hot, when she distinctly heard a train whistle. She held on to the metal railing in the shower stall, but the train was so close that the railing had begun to rattle. It was one of the old trains that the Long Island Rail Road still used on routes that were no longer well traveled. There was a long stretch of frozen tracks, and the snow was so blinding that Lila had to reach for her sunglasses. But once she got to East China, once she was standing in the front yard of her in-laws’ house, it was so warm that she didn’t even need a sweater. She could see herself right there, under the pine trees, but when she opened her mouth to speak nothing came out but a stone.

  Lila turned off the water and got out of the shower as fast as she could. She could still taste the cold weight of that stone in her mouth. She quickly got dressed and went down to get a cab, but when she got into the back seat she found that she’d lost her voice and it was a few moments before she could tell the driver where she wanted to go. In the doctor’s office she filled out a medical history with false information, then waited for nearly half an hour. A nurse led her into the consultation office, and that was when Lila realized how unsteady she was.

  Dr. Marshall had already begun to read her invented medical history. Lila sat absolutely still in a chair across from him; outside, in an alleyway, the garbage was being collected and metal cans hit hard against the pavement.

  “You’ve found a lump in your breast,” the doctor said, concerned.

  Lila kept her hands folded in her lap, but she could feel the blood running through them until each finger was amazingly hot.

  “No,” Lila said. “I haven’t.”

  Dr. Marshall was confused, and he looked back down at her history.

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” Lila said. “You placed her with a family on Long Island twenty-seven years ago, and I want her back.”

  “I think you’ve made a mistake,” Dr. Marshall said.

  “It was during the ice storm,” Lila told him.

  The door to the office had been left ajar; now the doctor got up and closed it. Lila sat calmly in the leather chair, but she could feel her heart racing.

  “What do you want?” Dr. Marshall asked.

  “I told you,” Lila said. “Just give me an address.”

  “You don’t understand,” the doctor said. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

  “You can,” Lila insisted.

  He told her that it was too late; her daughter was a grown woman, with parents, a history, a life of her own. But he couldn’t talk Lila out of it. Nothing he could say would erase her small bed drenched with milk or the three weeks afterward when she bled every time she walked down the hall to the bathroom, and everything she owned became stained with blood.

  “You think I don’t have any sympathy for you, but I do,” Dr. Marshall said. “If you had come to me the next day, or even the next week, I might have been able to do something.”

  “I was eighteen years old,” Lila said. “I couldn’t.”

  “I don’t think you’re listening to me,” the doctor said.

  She tried to explain what the moments just before the birth were like, how it was to touch your belly and know that inside there was a perfect mouth, eyes that already blinked, fingers that opened and closed, searching for something to hold on to. Inside your own body was another, you could feel the pressure of its head until the moment when it was half inside you and half lost to you forever, slipping farther and farther away with every second, with each heartbeat.

  “I don’t see how I can do what you’re asking,” Dr. Marshall said.

  Lila put one hand on her forehead and rubbed her temples.

  “I don’t see how you can’t,” she said.

  When the nurse in the reception room buzzed the intercom, Dr. Marshall picked up and told her he wasn’t taking calls. Then he turned to Lila.

  “I have two daughters myself,” he said.

  Lila looked at him carefully. He leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses, and Lila saw that something was wrong with one of his eyes—it was milky and unfocused. She forced herself to look away so she wouldn’t feel anything for him. Lila could tell, already, that he was about to reveal something, and she also knew that afterward there wouldn’t be a day when he wouldn’t feel he’d compromised himself.

  “I raised those girls and I still have times when I feel like they’re total strangers. I’m just warning you—you don’t know how disappointed you can be after twenty-seven years.”

  “You don’t know how much you can still regret something after twenty-seven years,” Lila said.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” Dr. Marshall asked Lila.

  Lila shook her head no, but the doctor stood up and took two ceramic mugs from the top of one of the filing cabinets behind his desk.

  “I strongly recommend some coffee,” he told her. Lila looked up at him. “All right,” she said.

  “Their last name was Ross;” the doctor said. “Naturally, I’m trusting you not to go through my files while I’m out of the room.”

  “Naturally,” Lila said.

  “I don’t approve of this,” Dr. Marshall said.

  “I know,” Lila said.

  “Cream and sugar all right?” he asked.

  “Perfect,” Lila told him. “Thank you.”

  He went to the kitchenette down the hall, giving her ten minutes. When he came back to the office, ca
rrying two mugs of coffee, she was gone. The file drawer on the far left had been opened and Dr. Marshall closed it. Then he drank both cups of coffee, even though he never took cream. He was tired, and his left eye was acting up so that things looked blurry. He had four more patients and a train ride to go before the end of the day, and it was one of those winter afternoons when the day already seems over at four o’clock, and everyone is tired and ready to quit much too early. Still, he wished he could have seen the look on her face when she’d finally gotten what she wanted. He never once guessed that Lila didn’t even look at the file after she’d found it. She just took it out of the drawer and slipped it inside her coat. She didn’t look at it out on the street, or even in the cab back to the hotel. She waited until she could sit down in the chair by the window. She waited until the sky was dark and the lights below her were turned on. And if the doctor had been able to see the look on her face, he would have been disappointed. Lila’s face didn’t give anything away. And when she really thought about it, she wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that her daughter had been given to a couple in East China, and that she had spent her first day on the same train Lila later took out, in that particularly cold winter when the Sound froze over and you could walk over the waves, all the way to Connecticut.

  Jason Grey picked her up from the train in a Ford station wagon that had no muffler and no shock absorbers. Lila walked right past him and went to stand out on the platform. But as soon as she saw the old Ford she knew it was his, and after she turned back toward the station she realized that an old man was watching her. It had been five years since her in-laws’ last visit to California, and in that time Jason’s hair had gone completely white. But that wasn’t what made him seem so much older—it was that he was no longer as tall. When Lila walked over and hugged him they seemed exactly the same height.

  “This is one of the best surprises I could have,” Jason Grey told Lila as he lifted her suitcase into the rear of the station wagon.

  They drove out to the East China Highway. There was no heater in the car and their breath fogged up the windshield. Somehow, he didn’t really seem surprised to see her. He took her out to breakfast and they both ordered coffee and eggs, and as they ate they watched the traffic on the highway.

  “If you’ve left Richard, he must have deserved it,” Jason Grey said in an offhand way.

  “Maybe I just decided I wanted to see you,” Lila said.

  Jason laughed and paid their bill; he had seen the way she was staring out at the East China Highway, and he knew he wasn’t the one she was there to see.

  Outside, the air was so salty and cold that it burned. A new layer of ice had formed on the windshield, and Jason took most of it off with a plastic scraper. They drove out to the house, then went down the rutted driveway and sat there staring at the place. The pine trees were taller than Lila had remembered; beneath them the house was drowning in a pool of black shadows. It was too dark even to see the wooden front door.

  Jason got her suitcase out of the back, and Lila followed him up to the house. The air was even colder underneath the pines, and it smelled sweet. Lila could feel something in her throat, and she forced herself to swallow hard.

  “I hope you’re not here to feel sorry for me,” Jason Grey said. He had pushed open the unlocked front door, but now he kept her standing out on the porch.

  “Absolutely not,” Lila said.

  “Good thing.” Jason nodded as he led her inside.

  He carried her suitcase up to the second floor and gave her the bedroom that used to be his and Helen’s. When Lila’s mother-in-law was first sick she couldn’t manage the stairs. They had moved into the parlor, and ever since Jason had kept the heat in the rest of the house shut off and he’d remained in the parlor bedroom. Now he got out a portable kerosene heater and started it up so that Lila’s room would be warm by the time she went to bed. While he poured in the kerosene Lila went to the window and wiped the fog off the glass. Out in the back the lawn had disappeared and the woods now came right up to the back of the house.

  “I started to have my doubts about mowing the lawn,” Jason explained when he saw her at the window. “It just seemed silly after a while.”

  Lila had come here without any real plan. She never imagined she’d waste a whole day with her father-in-law. But now that she was in this house, she felt strangely tired. After they’d gone back downstairs she sat down on the couch next to a hospital cot in the parlor. In no time three hours had gone by.

  She knew no one could do it for her. She had to walk out the door, start up the Ford, and drive to the other side of town. She was only five miles from her goal, and she was paralyzed. All the time the day was slipping away from her Lila kept thinking: I can do it anytime. But the horizon grew dark, and the birds mistook the parlor windows for the sky, beating their wings against the glass. Lila began to wonder if she would ever be able to leave this house. When she tried to lift her arms she couldn’t move. At dinnertime, Lila managed to follow Jason into the kitchen, but then her knees felt weak and she had to sit down.

  “This is my big secret,” Jason Grey said. He opened the refrigerator and pulled down the freezer compartment. “I eat frozen dinners.”

  Lila found that if she really tried she could pretend to speak.

  “I won’t tell,” she said, and she managed to stand up, light the oven with a wooden match, and slide two frozen dinners onto the lowest rack.

  They ate in the kitchen with the oven left on to heat the room. Every time she swallowed Lila swore the dinners hadn’t defrosted and that she was swallowing pieces of ice. Jason Grey seemed to be having no trouble with his turkey and mashed potatoes, although every once in a while he stopped eating long enough to fiddle with the stove.

  “I can’t stand to give the oil companies any more money than they already have,” he explained. “The oven in here isn’t too bad, and I put the woodstove in the parlor three years ago.”

  Lila really didn’t know what was happening to her. She put her fork down and covered her eyes.

  “I’ll freeze to death before I give the oil companies another cent,” Jason said cheerfully. “I’ll bet you think I can’t make good coffee,” he added. “Well, you’re wrong.”

  He got up to start the coffee, and he let Lila cry.

  “Thanks,” Lila said when he brought over the coffeepot.

  “I don’t like to see you upset,” Jason said.

  “Oh, well,” Lila said.

  “I mean it,” Jason said. “I don’t like to see it.”

  He got some milk and sugar and took down two cups from the top cabinet. “We don’t have owls any more around here,” he told Lila. “Remember how there used to be owls all over East China—in the trees and everywhere? They just took off, and now the only thing you hear at night is traffic. You never used to hear traffic around here.”

  They drank coffee and Lila took off her boots and lifted her feet up to warm them by the oven. Sitting here with Jason, she could almost forget why she had come back to East China in the first place.

  “We should have asked you to live with us,” she told her father-in-law.

  “Not me,” Jason Grey said. “I’m never going to California.”

  It turned out that Jason wasn’t paying for hot water any more either, so Lila boiled some water to wash the coffee cups and spoons. By the time she finished and went into the parlor, Jason was already asleep on the couch, and Lila covered him with a wool afghan her mother-in-law had crocheted. Then she turned off the lights. She went upstairs and got into bed, but when she turned off the lamp on the night table there was still a glow from the kerosene heater. In that bedroom, beneath a heavy quilt, Lila felt perfectly safe. It was quite possible, she knew, to stay here forever. Especially in winter, when it was dark by four and there was wood to be brought in, salt blocks to be dragged out to the yard for the deer, ice on all the windows. She hadn’t known quite how much she’d missed winter, and now that she was back she almost
felt young in this season, in this house. That night she brushed her hair a hundred times with a wire brush she’d found on the bureau, and she slept deeply as the ice on the windows grew thicker. By midnight you couldn’t have seen outside even if you’d wanted to; it was as if nothing existed on the other side of the glass but snow and an old road that led nowhere in particular.

  In the morning, Lila woke suddenly. The heater had run out of kerosene and the room was freezing. She reached for her clothes and got dressed under the covers the way she and Richard used to on mornings when it was too cold to get out of bed. Sometime during the night Jason Grey had woken up, put more wood in the parlor stove, then gone back to sleep on his cot. When he came into the kitchen at six-thirty Lila had already made coffee and French toast, which was staying warm on a plate in the oven.

  Jason smiled when Lila brought his plate to the table. “I never knew you could cook like this.”

  Lila turned the oven up higher, then put on a second borrowed sweater, and watched her father-in-law eat. She couldn’t quite believe she had been in the house for less than twenty-four hours. In a little while she planned to fix the wallpaper that was coming down in the hallway; all it needed was some masking tape and glue.

  After breakfast, Jason insisted on doing the dishes.

  “I guess you’re going somewhere today,” he said when he’d finished. He had used cold water and the cups and plates were streaked.

  Lila could feel a tightening in her throat.

  “I was thinking about getting some groceries,” Lila said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Jason Grey said.

  Lila had the sudden urge for a cigarette. There was a pack of Marlboros on the table; she lit one, but the smoke only made her throat feel worse and she handed the cigarette to her father-in-law. She just wasn’t ready to go out. Maybe after some time in this house, after the winter when there was something else in the world besides snow, maybe then she could think about it.

  “We both know you didn’t come out here just to see me,” Jason Grey said. “I’m not asking why you’re here, you understand.”