Property of / the Drowning Season / Fortune's Daughter / at Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  “Oh, my God,” Lila said. “She’s right there.”

  In the fluorescent lighting of the kitchen Janet Ross suddenly looked much older than she was.

  “What do you want?” she whispered.

  Lila knew that she could lose it all now; one more outburst and she might never find out where her daughter was. “You don’t have to be nervous now that we’ve begun to talk about children,” she said. But she could tell that Janet Ross wasn’t quite as stupid as she’d thought.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your car,” Janet said.

  “Of course there is,” Lila said quickly. “Just take a look at it.”

  “I don’t want you here,” Janet Ross told her.

  “You’re the one who invited me in!” Lila said.

  She could feel the edge of Janet’s hysteria as Janet stood up and reached for the phone.

  “I’m calling the police,” Janet Ross said.

  Lila leapt up and grabbed the phone receiver out of her hand.

  “Don’t you dare call the police,” Lila said, and when she let go of the phone Janet obediently hung up. Lila had no time to waste. She went into the living room and began to search for signs of her daughter. Janet followed her and watched as Lila tore through the house. She went through the bureau drawers and found nothing—not a photograph, not an address. She went through the bedrooms, the closets, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and all the while Janet followed her, watching. By the time Lila had finished with the last room—a den in which there was a fold-out couch for guests—she was shivering.

  “I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Janet said. “We don’t have anything worth stealing. Take the color TV if you want it.” She took off her wristwatch and her diamond ring and held them out to Lila. “Here,” she offered. “Take these.”

  “There’s nothing here,” Lila said weakly.

  “I could have told you that,” Janet Ross said. “You picked the wrong house.”

  Lila went to the front door and let herself out. It was freezing cold, and Lila just couldn’t wait for the car to warm up, so every time she shifted into gear, the engine stalled. She should have known from the minute she walked through the door that no child had ever lived there. If her daughter had grown up in that house she would have left some sign for Lila: a framed picture of a robin, bronzed baby shoes, fingerprints that Janet Ross could never get off the kitchen door. Lila immediately blamed Dr. Marshall for giving her the wrong address to throw her off the track, but maybe it was an innocent mix-up of his files, and after all these years what could anyone expect? Files got lost, names misplaced, children disappeared on cold, clear days. And as Lila drove away she had only one wish: that she had come here last night at midnight with a pack of matches and some kerosene and burned this house to the ground. Then, at least, there’d have been smoke and ashes, and when Lila had picked through the rubble she could have imagined that everything she touched had once belonged to her daughter.

  Lila went back to her father-in-law’s house and sat down in the kitchen with her coat still on. Jason Grey was in the back, putting out salt licks for the deer. When he heard the Ford pull up he finished and came inside. As soon as he saw Lila he knew she hadn’t gotten whatever it was she’d wanted.

  “Do you want me to ask you what’s wrong?” he said.

  Lila shook her head no.

  He made her a pot of coffee and set it down on the table, then he left her alone. Lila sat in the kitchen all afternoon. She could hear the TV turned on in the parlor, she could hear footsteps in the hallway every once in a while when Jason came as close to the kitchen doorway as he dared, just to check on her. When it started to get dark, Lila didn’t bother to turn on the light. She could sit there in the dark forever, and the colder it got in the room, the less she felt like moving. She let the cold get into her bones and if she waited long enough, if she really tried, she might be able to feel nothing at all.

  It was seven in the evening when the phone rang, and by then Lila was so cold that she could barely move. Jason came in from the parlor and they both watched the phone, set out on the kitchen counter, as it rang five more times.

  “You know who that is,” Jason Grey said. “He always calls me on a Friday night.”

  Jason went over and turned the oven on.

  “You shouldn’t be sitting here,” he told Lila. “It’s too cold.”

  The phone began to ring again.

  “I take it you don’t want to talk to him,” Jason said. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the sink. Bent over that way he was actually shorter than Lila.

  Everything seemed to have a hard edge; when Lila looked at her father-in-law she could see only his skeleton.

  The phone had stopped ringing, and this time Jason went over and pulled the plug out of the wall.

  “You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to, Lila,” Jason Grey said. “But I’ll tell you one thing you do have to do—eat dinner. And I’ll tell you what I have in mind.” He was talking to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to be there together in the dark with her not saying a thing. “Helen never liked for me to have Italian food, she was sure it was bad for your heart. But I’ve been thinking about going to a restaurant in town. And that’s what I’m going to do—I’m going to take you out to dinner.”

  They left the kitchen oven on, so that the house would warm up. Jason Grey put on his down jacket, and his high boots, and then they walked arm in arm down the dirt driveway toward the Ford. Lila held on tightly to her father-in-law, so that he wouldn’t slip on the ice. The stars were brighter than they’d ever been and the sky was so huge it made you aware of how fragile you were, how easy it would be to slip on the ice and break something. As they walked past the pines it grew even colder, and Lila breathed in deeply, but she didn’t dare speak. Already, she could feel that the stone had formed and was waiting to drop from her tongue.

  On the day of her daughter’s birthday it was fifty-eight degrees, one of the warmest days in January anyone in East China could remember. By now Lila couldn’t go any farther than the end of the driveway, and she knew it was pointless to try. It was as if there was a sudden drop in the oxygen out there, or a pack of half-starved wolves roaming the East China Highway, out for blood.

  Of course there were things she could have done: hired detectives, made phone calls, pored over school records in the basement of the elementary school. But nothing outside the yard of Jason Grey’s house seemed very real, and California seemed most unreal of all. Richard kept calling. Twice, Lila had overheard Jason Grey talking to him on the telephone, and each time she had been startled by the idea that you could talk to someone who was three thousand miles away.

  “I’m telling you she’s all right,” she had heard her father-in-law tell Richard on the Saturday after she’d been to see Janet Ross. But Richard refused to believe him; he phoned again and again, and when he called one night after midnight, Lila could tell he was thinking about following her. She stood in the kitchen doorway, near the cabinet where the brooms were stored; she dreaded the possibility that Richard might come after her. Jason sensed her presence in the room and turned to her. Lila couldn’t seem to blink, and Jason was reminded of the deer who edged closer and closer to the house each season, as the woods claimed more and more of the yard.

  “Don’t argue with me,” Jason had said to Richard. “Sometimes people need to be alone and you can’t take it personally.”

  Richard stopped calling after that. Lila tried to thank her father-in-law by baking him a cake, but she ran out of flour, and she couldn’t go into town any more, not even to the grocery on Main Street. Each day she stayed closer and closer to the house, but on her daughter’s birthday the weather was so seductive that even Lila went outside. She pulled on a pair of Jason Grey’s old boots and began to rake the mud in the front yard. She had been working for nearly an hour, and had broken two fingernails when she heard the car pull into the driveway, its
wheels spinning in the mud. The birds had gone crazy with the sudden warmth; there were so many of them searching for worms that from certain angles the earth looked blue. At the far edge of the yard were the shells of two Chryslers waiting for spring when Jason would rebuild them. If he worked slowly enough, he had told Lila, those Chryslers might keep him busy for the rest of his life.

  When the car pulled in, Lila stood up and put one hand on her hip. Every time she licked her lips she tasted salt; she had lost so much weight in the past two weeks that her wedding band slipped up and down her fourth finger easily. But now she held on to the rake so tightly that the ring stayed in place. She knew, right then, as the car pulled over and parked, that she was about to find her daughter. The first thing she did was make a quick list of things she had to do: wash her hair, file down the nails that had broken while she raked, look through her mother-in-law’s closet for a leather belt, polish her one good pair of shoes.

  Janet Ross didn’t see Lila out in the yard, and Lila let her walk to the house without calling to her. She enjoyed watching from a distance as Janet navigated through the mud and knocked on the front door and she stood still as Jason Grey invited Janet inside. Lila wanted this exact moment to go on and on. She wanted the same sound of the birds, and the thud of the front door as her father-in-law closed it, and the air so surprisingly warm and sweet it made you feel like crying. And when she finally walked back to the house, Lila made certain to take her time—because, after all, she had been waiting for this moment for more than half her life.

  She took off her boots in the hallway and hung her sweater on a hook by the door. It was still chilly in the house, from months of freezing weather. Lila could hear voices in the parlor and, standing in the hallway, she was reminded of the first time Richard had brought her here. Then it had been Helen Grey’s voice she had heard, and the sound of it had made her frightened to go in. She’d had a strong sense of interrupting something, of stepping inside a place where she didn’t belong.

  “Don’t worry,” Richard had whispered to her, and he had taken her arm to give her courage. “They’re going to be crazy about you.”

  Janet Ross was sitting on the couch, still wearing her coat, when Lila walked into the room. Jason had just put out a cigarette and was coughing. His cough, Lila couldn’t help noticing, was getting worse.

  “I guess you lied to me,” Lila said, right away, not willing to give Janet Ross an inch.

  “I’ll bet you ladies are thirsty,” Jason Grey said. He had been sitting in the old chair that faced the couch, and now he stood. “What if I offered you both some bourbon and water?”

  Lila and Janet Ross were staring at each other.

  “None for me,” Lila said to her father-in-law.

  “None for me,” Janet echoed.

  “You’ll excuse me if I get some for myself,” Jason Grey said, and he left the room. They could hear him in the kitchen, but then the back door slammed, and Lila knew that what he’d wanted wasn’t a drink but an excuse to leave them alone.

  “I guess your father-in-law lives here by himself,” Janet Ross said. “You can always tell just by looking at a room.”

  Lila sat down in the armchair. She could still hear the birds outside, even through the closed windows.

  “You can tell from a room when something’s gone wrong,” Janet said.

  She looked at Lila then.

  “As soon as I saw you I knew you were Susan’s birth mother,” she said.

  The name cut right through Lila. That was definitely not her daughter’s name, not Susan. All during her pregnancy, and even after the baby was born, Lila had not once thought of a name for her daughter. It was only lately that she felt her daughter had to have a name, and she certainly wasn’t about to let someone like Janet Ross choose it.

  “Not her birth mother,” Lila said. “Her real mother.”

  Janet Ross looked toward the doorway of the parlor after Jason Grey. “Maybe I will have that bourbon,” she said.

  “I don’t think there is any,” Lila told her. “He just wanted to get out of the room.”

  “Well, I don’t blame him,” Janet said. She unbuttoned her coat, but she was so nervous that she couldn’t get all the buttons undone. “It certainly was a different kind of January back then,” she said. “It was so cold that when you stepped out for a second to get the mail your eyelashes froze together and you couldn’t see a thing.”

  “I know what it was like,” Lila said.

  “When the phone call came I thought I was dreaming,” Janet said. “I was half asleep, and my husband had worked late the day before so he was exhausted—he didn’t even hear it ring.”

  “Look,” Lila said, “I don’t care about you or your husband. I don’t care about anything you have to say. I just want to know where she is.”

  “I know that’s what you want,” Janet said. “That’s why I’m telling you this. Because I remember everything about it. I remember thinking, This is going to be the best day of my life. Even before it happens to me, I know it can never be any better.”

  They were in Dr. Marshall’s office when he brought her in to them. At first Janet was afraid to touch her; she had wanted her so much that now if she reached out a little too quickly the baby might dissolve into smoke. Of course, once she did hold the baby she refused to let go. She held her all the way back to East China and refused to speak. Even when her husband asked her a direct question, she just couldn’t answer. It was all too perfect to talk about. From the window of the train they could see that the sound had frozen solid, each wave had turned into green ice.

  That first night Janet sat in the rocking chair in the nursery, fed the baby a bottle, and sang her to sleep. Lewis had wanted to call the baby Deborah, after his grandmother, but the name Susan came to Janet the moment Dr. Marshall put the baby in her arms, and she insisted upon it.

  After that first quiet night Susan couldn’t seem to sleep, and Janet had to rock with her for hours. The baby slept peacefully during the day, but as soon as it grew dark she was restless. All the books assured Janet that this sort of fretting was normal, but sometimes, after Susan had finally fallen asleep and her mouth was still puckered from crying, Janet wondered if it was something more, if Susan simply couldn’t bear the dark. After a while, they settled into a routine, but Janet still felt drawn to the nursery at night. She stood in the doorway, and even from a distance she could see that Susan’s skin was luminous. She nearly shimmered beneath her woolen blanket, and even on moonless nights the nursery seemed brighter than the rest of the house, as if the baby had managed to chase away the night.

  Janet’s husband, Lewis, may not have been a model husband—he worked overtime too much, and he sometimes didn’t listen to a word she said—but he was a good father to Susan. He brought home dresses and toys, and when the baby came down with a cold in February he took turns rocking her back to sleep. Susan’s cold lingered for more than a month. It seemed to wrap her in a cocoon, and Janet had the feeling that the baby was far away, even when she was holding her. Janet had Lewis hook up an intercom to connect their bedroom with the nursery, and whenever she heard a hiccup or a cough in the middle of the night she sat up in bed, eyes riveted to the intercom until it was quiet again. She was overanxious, but what had she expected? She had been afraid of losing this baby even before she had her, and now she couldn’t escape the uneasy feeling that Susan was somehow on loan to her, and that sooner or later she’d have to give her up.

  In early April the weather turned warmer and Susan’s lingering cold disappeared. Janet began to take her everywhere, first to the market, and then for drives in the car. They went to towns where Janet had never been before, to restaurants and diners where Susan sat in her infant seat, propped up on the table quietly drinking her bottle without any fuss at all. For the first time in her life Janet began to talk to strangers, and when she did, she lied. She pretended that she was Susan’s natural mother; she described her labor to waitresses, she discussed her
nursing problems with women at the next table. And all the while she felt Susan watching her, studying her carefully with her wide eyes.

  At three months, Susan had smiled for the first time. A few weeks later she actually turned over and both her parents were so overcome they had tears in their eyes. Susan watched everything now, and she looked so knowing that Janet sometimes felt uncomfortable. She had gotten into the habit of talking to Susan all day long, calling out each ingredient as she added to the batter of a chocolate cake, reading aloud from the morning newspaper. Sometimes Janet marveled at her own nerve. How had she ever dared to think she could take care of this child? How could she have pretended to be someone’s mother?

  Janet felt proud whenever Susan did anything new, as if she had something to do with the child’s brilliance. She could sit for hours, rapt, as Susan studied the mobile above her crib, or carefully examined her toes. They were a closed circle, the two of them, and even Lewis sometimes felt like an intruder. It may have been because of those colds Susan continued to have; though none was bad enough for a trip to the doctor, Janet was so protective that even she began to be amazed at how fierce her love had become. There was something about sitting up late at night with Susan that made Janet totally surrender to the child. Each time her daughter reached up and put her arms around her neck the world outside the nursery evaporated, the nightlight on the wall became far brighter than the moon.

  There had been a two-month visit to the pediatrician, and there would be another at six months. But even if someone had suggested that something was wrong, Janet Ross wouldn’t have believed it. She didn’t even notice how small Susan was until the child was five months old. It was June; the mimosa trees were in flower and the air was silky. Janet took Susan down to the playground near the harbor for the first time in her new stroller. That day Susan was dressed in white cotton tights and a yellow dress, and Janet felt she had never seen a more beautiful child. At the park she sat on a green wooden bench with the other mothers. She took Susan out of her stroller and held her on her lap; together they watched two ten-year-old boys on the swings who were making themselves dizzy with height. Across from them, on another green bench, were two other mothers whose children were in strollers identical to Susan’s. They waved to Janet and she waved back gaily, and she didn’t even have the urge to lie to anyone about her labor and delivery. That’s how right she felt sitting there with the other mothers. That’s how perfect the day was.