Fortune's Daughter

by Alice Hoffman

  After a while, Lila went inside. She pulled the screen closed and locked the door. Then she carried her suitcase into the bedroom and began to unpack. She had a headache, a bad one. Bad enough so that when she closed her eyes she swore she could see Richard. His car was idling in the parking lot behind the liquor store on La Brea and the radio was turned on. Everyone who walked past could hear it, and it made them self-conscious about going into a liquor store alone. They all wound up buying more to drink than they’d intended, and they thought it was the Ray Charles song on the radio that made them feel like getting really drunk. But it wasn’t. It was seeing somebody who looked desperate parked out there in the lot on such a beautiful night that could really get to you, if you let it. Even if the big decision Richard was working on at that moment was a choice between bourbon and scotch.

  Lila took two aspirins from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom before she came back and took off her coat and boots. A jet passed by overhead, and out in someone’s yard a dog began to howl. When Lila had unpacked she went to her bureau and picked up the three silver bracelets she had left there. She put them on and they hit against each other, like pieces of ice in a glass. She thought, then, of her father-in-law. It was late in New York, and he was certainly already asleep in the parlor. Richard had told her that on the afternoon of Helen’s funeral, Jason Grey had locked himself in a closet and cried. Afterward, they’d had dinner together, a casserole sent over by the wife of the fellow who’d bought Jason’s gas station a few years back. Richard had continually looked over at his father, waiting for him to break down again. But he hadn’t—he ate some of what was on his plate, had coffee, and went to lie down on the couch in the parlor at a little after eight. Richard slept in his old bedroom. Near midnight he heard something out in back of the house and woke up. He went to the window and saw that his father was out there, digging a hole in the ground with a shovel. The first thing he’d thought, he’d told Lila later, was that his father was digging his own grave. That night the moon was orange and full and Richard had been certain that the reason his father had not appeared to be grieving during dinner was that he’d been planning to bury himself alive.

  Richard had stood at the window, unable to move. Outside, Jason Grey stopped digging; he leaned on his shovel and looked up at the sky. That was when Richard could see that the hole his father had been digging was much too small for a grave, even for something the size of a small dog. Jason took something out of his pocket. Richard pressed his face against the window and he could see that his father held a palm full of jewelry. It was Helen Grey’s jewelry—her wedding ring, a small aquamarine brooch, a strand of seed pearls, a silver locket in the shape of a heart. Jason Grey knelt down and carefully buried the jewelry in the ground. But then he didn’t go away—he just stood there, and he was standing there long after Richard had turned and gone back to bed.

  When he’d come home to Los Angeles a few days later, Richard told Lila that at the moment when his father knelt on the damp ground, he’d had the sense that something was about to begin. It wasn’t until the following morning that he realized what he’d felt was the start of his father’s grief, the beginning of something that would take years to complete.

  Lila sat on the edge of the bed and took off her silver bracelets. She felt terribly moved by the thought of her father-in-law out in his backyard, in the dark, opening his hands and trying to let his wife go. But, the truth was, it wasn’t the same. Outside, the dog who had been chained up tugged on his lead and whined. The sky was dark now, you couldn’t even see the birds who were nesting in the lemon tree for the night. There was simply no loss that compared to the death of a child. It was the one death that contained a thousand more within itself. An unbreakable ring, the end of everything your child might have been, the girl of ten, the woman of twenty, the one loss you just cannot bring yourself to believe.

  If Lila had been there, if she’d felt her daughter grow cold, if she’d been the one forced to search all over East China for a coffin small enough, she might have accepted it by now. She might have been able to take her father-in-law’s advice to let the dead go, even though afterward there would have been marks on her palms from the wrenching of letting go, small pinpoints that let in air and never seemed to heal. But instead of mourning what had been lost, Lila reached into her suitcase and took out her daughter’s sweater. She held it in her hands and she closed her eyes until she couldn’t see anything but white light. And as she sat there on the edge of the bed she could feel the material in her hands begin to grow warmer—so she closed her eyes tighter and willed her daughter to come to her.

  Richard came home after eleven. He’d had more to drink than he could ever remember. He parked his car in the driveway and carefully maneuvered his way up the dark path. There wasn’t a sound in the street, just his unsteady footsteps on the cement. When he got to the front door he just couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He sat down on the porch steps, between the two rose bushes, and tried to figure out what had gone wrong.

  Lila knew that he was back. She realized that all she had to do was make one move and all the others would follow. Just get out of bed, then put on her robe, then walk down the hallway and unlatch the front door. But she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t let her thoughts be swayed for a second. Her thoughts had to be as pure as light. And so she didn’t move when she heard him push the latch up on the screen door, then unlock the front door.

  He stood outside the closed bedroom door for a while, and then he went to the linen closet in the hallway and got some sheets. He undressed in the living room, in the dark. Just before he was about to lie down on the couch Richard realized that he smelled something burning. He followed the smell into the kitchen, where it turned overpoweringly bitter. The kitchen was dark, except for a circle of blue light that seemed somehow dangerous. For a split second, Richard found that he was afraid. But then he switched on the overhead light and saw that the blue circle was only the gas burner on the stove, turned on and forgotten. The water in the kettle had boiled away and the tin bottom was charred and smoking. Richard turned off the gas and put the kettle in the sink. He turned on the cold water and there was a rush of steam as the hot metal sizzled. When the kettle had cooled down, Richard tossed it in the trash, but even after he had opened the window the burning scent was still there, clinging to the curtains and the walls.

  Richard didn’t bother to put the sheets on the couch. He lay there, unable to sleep, imagining the way Lila used to look. The first time he saw her he knew there could never be anyone else, and the first time he had made love to her, he had actually cried—that’s how much he’d wanted her. Every night he watched as she brushed her hair a hundred strokes with a wire brush. And he simply couldn’t stop watching her, not even after she had fallen asleep. As she slept she reached out for him, she did it every night, just as every night Richard pulled her a little closer until it seemed there was only one person asleep in their bed and only one heart beating.

  But on this night Lila didn’t reach out for her husband, she didn’t even think about him. She lay in their bed and concentrated so hard that she could feel the room spin. Her blood moved faster and faster; her fingertips began to burn. After a while Lila could feel herself growing weaker, and she knew she didn’t have much more to give. The sheets beneath her were soaked with sweat and she could feel she was just about to break—her bones were rising up to the surface like fish, her skin simply couldn’t contain energy like this. And just as she was about to give up, Lila felt something move in her arms. She ground her teeth and refused to give up. She concentrated even harder, imagining every tiny finger and toe, recalling each second after her baby’s birth—the shape of her cheek, the dark eyelashes, the odor of blood and milk. At last, Lila felt a weight on the bed next to her. She held her breath and when she opened her eyes she could see, even in the dark, that her daughter was finally beside her.

  The baby’s eyes were closed, her eyelids as white as stones. Slowly,
the lids fluttered, and two perfect slate-gray eyes stared up at Lila. There was an outline of light all around the baby. Even when Lila held her tighter underneath a white sheet, the outline remained. And Lila wept when she realized that her daughter knew her, she cried so many tears that in no time at all both she and her child were coated with salt.

  Out in the hallway you could see the light that surrounded the baby escape from under the bedroom door. It spread out all along the floor, into the other rooms of the house. Richard might have seen it if he hadn’t been on his back, staring at the ceiling. He wished that he were holding his wife, but by now it was after midnight and Richard wouldn’t have dreamed of disturbing Lila, any more than Lila would have thought to call out his name. Richard fell right asleep, maybe because he knew that he’d be sleeping out in the living room for a long time. And every night after that, before he went to sleep, Richard stood outside the bedroom door for a moment, and every night Lila heard him. But neither of them could go to the other; a thin sheet of glass had sprung up between them, and it separated them until they were as distant from each other as they were from the stars.

  At the beginning of her eighth month, Rae woke up one morning and decided that she wouldn’t go through with it after all. It wasn’t being pregnant, she had gotten used to that—the insomnia, the heartburn, the pressure on her bladder, the way she had to get down on her knees every time she wanted to pick her shoes up off the floor. It was the idea of labor that terrified her. Throughout her life there had been a conspiracy, and there was still a secret she’d never been told. Lately, women with small children had begun to smile at her for no reason at all. Rae had thought it was sympathy—she was so lumbering and huge—or a particularly sweet memory of the time when their own child was about to be born. Now she realized it was something more—a moment of compassion for the uninitiated, a spinning backward through time to their own innocence. No one had ever told Rae the truth about childbirth. Not her Lamaze instructor, not her doctor, not her own mother. No one had bothered to suggest to her just how much it might hurt.

  She’d done the practical things—read child-care books, renewed her insurance coverage, interviewed day-care mothers, even gone to a parenting course at U.C.L.A., where she’d given a doll a bath in a plastic washtub and pretended to insert a thermometer to check for fever. Still, the idea of holding an infant in her arms scared her. She had never even changed a diaper. The one time when she had baby-sat, she’d been lost. She’d sat for a nine-month-old boy who lived down the block from her parents’ house, and he’d been asleep when she arrived. Rae was sixteen, and madly in love with Jessup, and she’d arranged for him to come over an hour after the child’s parents had gone to the movies. They were on the couch, kissing, when the baby woke up. There’d been no warning, no slow escalation of louder and louder cries—suddenly the baby was screaming his head off, as if he had been stuck with pins.

  “Oh, shit,” Jessup had said. He sat up and threw his head back against the couch. “Why did I bother to come over here?”

  Rae ran upstairs and peeked into the nursery. A nightlight gave off a purplish glow. From the doorway, Rae could see the baby standing up, holding on to the bars of his crib, screaming in a way that turned her blood cold. Rae stood there for a moment, then ran back downstairs. She found Jessup in the kitchen, looking through the refrigerator for a beer. When he saw Rae he was surprised.

  “Why didn’t you shut him up?” Jessup asked.

  “I don’t know how to,” Rae said.

  Jessup found a six-pack. He took out a can and pulled off the tab. “Did you change his diaper?” he said.

  Rae could feel the baby’s screams inside her skin. “I can’t,” she admitted. “I never did it before.”

  “You can’t?” Jessup said. “You took this job and you don’t even know how to change a diaper?”

  Rae looked away from him and shrugged.

  “What about feeding him?”

  “I don’t know how to,” Rae had said in a small voice.

  “Jesus Christ, Rae,” Jessup said to her. “Don’t invite me to any more of your jobs, all right?”

  He slammed his beer down on the counter, got a bottle of formula out of the refrigerator, warmed it, then left her there in tears. She felt absolutely desperate—the pitch of the baby’s cry had grown worse, and Rae imagined covering his mouth with her hand and shaking him until he stopped. But after a few minutes, the crying stopped, and Rae took off her shoes so she could creep back upstairs. By the time she got to the nursery, Jessup had changed the baby’s diaper and he was sitting in the rocking chair feeding the baby his bottle. Rae stood in the doorway and listened to the squeak of the rocking chair and the greedy sound of the baby’s swallowing. After a while she felt like an intruder, so she went back downstairs and sat on the couch.

  Jessup came down after the baby was asleep. He got his beer, sat down next to Rae, and put his boots up on the coffee table.

  “How did you do that?” Rae said to him.

  “Do what?” Jessup said, as though he had never left her side.

  They’d heard the key in the lock then, and Jessup had immediately leapt to his feet. He ran into the kitchen and was out the back door before the baby’s parents had set foot in the house. But they saw the open beer can on the coffee table and, to Rae’s great relief, they told her they’d see to it that she never baby-sat for anyone in the neighborhood ever again.

  Afterward she tried to get Jessup to explain how he’d known what to do.

  “I’ve got a couple of cousins,” Jessup had said with a shrug. “Every kid is the same—when they pee you change their diaper. Then you give them something to eat so they can pee again and you can change their diaper again. It’s no big deal.”

  Still, there was one thing Rae couldn’t figure out—how Jessup had known to put the baby over his shoulder after he’d had his bottle, and gently rub his back until he fell asleep. Rae had been right there, standing in the doorway, but the room had been dark and there had been that purple, misleading glow of light, and after a while she guessed that she’d been seeing things. Maybe Jessup hadn’t been as gentle as she’d imagined. Maybe he hadn’t actually been humming, and she had also imagined the sound of a lullaby that was so sweet you knew you weren’t meant to overhear.

  She was missing him more these days, she was even dreaming about him. She dreamed that she was out in the desert, late at night, when there wasn’t a soul around. The Oldsmobile was parked in a dusty field, and Rae sat on its hood, looking at the sky. She heard hoofbeats then, and she knew even before she saw it that it was one of Jessup’s horses, smaller than a pony, with a coat that was the same blue-black color as the night. The horse came up right alongside her, and Rae could tell that Jessup had sent him to her. She waited, and after a while the horse spoke to her and told her that Jessup was being held captive. They stood there in the dark and both of them began to cry. Their tears formed a pool, and when Rae bent to look she saw that there were silvery fish swimming in circles, shimmering in the dark water. And when Rae looked even closer she noticed that where each fish’s gills should be there was a tiny arm, and a hundred babies’ hands paddled in the water.

  Another time she dreamed that she and Jessup were making love, and when she woke she missed him more than ever, and all that morning she was weak in the knees, as though she had just come from her lover’s bed. Missing Jessup was bad enough, what made it worse was that everyone around Rae was so distant and preoccupied. Freddy Contina didn’t even go home any more. He worked till midnight and slept in his office, and he still couldn’t figure out why no theater would release the films he’d brought back from Europe. Rae couldn’t talk to him, and she couldn’t talk to Richard any more either. Something was so wrong with Richard you could feel it just by touching his hand. When he knelt down beside Rae in Lamaze class his unhappiness interrupted Rae’s concentration, and she often lost count of how many breaths she had taken. After class, as they walked out to the parking
lot together, Rae always felt as if she were alone. She tried to talk to Richard about Lila, but he refused. “Don’t even think about her,” he told Rae. “Don’t be concerned.” But Rae couldn’t help it, she was concerned. And sometimes, late at night, Rae wondered if she might have to pay for the sorrow on Lila’s face when she walked in and saw them in the living room, a look that made Rae think of the way she used to look at Jessup when she knew he was about to go somewhere and leave her all alone.

  She still couldn’t quite believe Jessup wasn’t coming back. She began to actively try to erase him from her mind. She took all his old clothes to a mission downtown and filled out a change-of-address card for him at the post office. She no longer ran to the window when she heard something that sounded like his footsteps; on the anniversary of the day he’d first kissed her she went to the Chinese take-out place around the corner and ordered everything he hated: shrimp with black bean sauce, spicy eggplant, mysterious flavored chicken.

  On a Sunday early in March, when she had nearly managed to forget him, Rae got out of the shower and heard a knock at the door. She just stood there with a towel wrapped around her head. For a moment, right before she threw on her bathrobe and answered the door, she felt a surge of heat near her heart. She knew exactly who she wanted it to be out there in the courtyard, and after she opened the door and saw that it was only Jessup’s partner, Hal, she was so disappointed it showed.

  Hal had been out there for a while, trying to summon up the nerve to knock. He had brought her carnations which had been dipped in red dye, and the flowers made it impossible for Rae to turn him away. She made him some coffee, then went into the bathroom and got dressed. When she came back to the kitchen he was still stirring his coffee, and he seemed much more interested in the way Rae arranged the carnations than he did in having something to drink. She sat down across from him at the table and watched him carefully.