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

by Alice Hoffman

  When it was time to go home, Janet put Susan back into the stroller and walked past the mothers on the bench across from theirs.

  “Look,” one of the women said to her child, “a brand-new baby!”

  The children in the other strollers stared gravely at Susan.

  “Not all that new,” Janet smiled.

  “God, I can barely remember when Jessie was that small,” the woman said.

  “I don’t think Paul was ever that small,” her friend said. “He was ten pounds two ounces at birth.”

  Janet bent down to the stroller and smiled. “Hear that?” she said to Susan. “But just you wait till you’re as old as these babies are now. I won’t even be able to lift you up.”

  Susan looked so beautiful in her stroller that Janet could hardly bear it. She had the urge to pick her up again; instead she smoothed down Susan’s skirt.

  “How old is she?” the first mother asked Janet. “About six weeks?”

  “Six weeks!” Janet laughed. “She was just five months. She’s already wearing size six months clothes.”

  The two mothers on the bench looked at each other; both knew that a newborn child could fit into that size.

  “She was only five pounds six ounces when she was born,” Janet said, flustered.

  Susan had untied her hat and the two mothers were studying her.

  “How old are yours?” Janet said stiffly.

  “I love that hat of hers,” one of the mothers said. “I never saw anything so cute.”

  Janet looked closely at the two other children in their strollers; both were twice Susan’s size and Janet guessed they were somewhere between a year and eighteen months old.

  “I’d really like to know,” Janet said now. “How old are they?”

  “Jessie is four months this week, but Paul is already six months,” one of the mothers said quietly.

  “My daughter is very petite,” Janet said quickly. She felt as though she’d been slapped.

  “That’s right.” The other mother was just as quick to agree. “Five foot two, eyes of blue. She’ll have all the boys chasing after her.”

  Janet walked home then. Susan fell asleep on the way, and Janet left her out on the porch in her stroller. She went inside and sat down on the couch, but after a while she went and got her baby. It just didn’t seem right to leave her out there, asleep and defenseless, because it now seemed that the air was a little too silky, and the sky was almost threatening, it was too bright and too blue.

  That night Janet asked her husband to measure Susan. They held her down on the couch and lined up a tape measure. Janet looked up the growth chart in the back of one of the baby books and she found that Susan’s length was that of a six- or eight-week-old baby. She had just stopped growing, and they hadn’t even noticed. She had been getting four bottles of formula a day and she’d never cried out or complained that she was hungry, but when they weighed her now, sitting her down on the bathroom scale, she was only ten pounds.

  Janet could feel something inside her snapping, but after she put Susan to sleep and Lewis wanted to talk about it, she couldn’t.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Janet insisted.

  But she lay in bed awake all night, and she could tell Lewis was awake, too.

  “I’ve thought it over,” he told her in the morning. “There probably is nothing wrong with her, but maybe she has a hormone deficiency or something. I just want to take her in and get her examined. I want to be sure.”

  He was right, and Janet nodded her head, but she just couldn’t stand it. Lewis took the day off from work and they drove to see the pediatrician. When the doctor saw Susan something in his eyes changed. It passed in a moment, and he calmly examined Susan, but Janet knew then that something was wrong. He never accused them of anything, although now all Janet could think of was why hadn’t they thought to weigh her, why hadn’t they brought her in one of those times she was coughing and feverish? By the end of the exam the doctor had made an appointment for a chest X-ray that afternoon at Central Suffolk Hospital.

  “That’s impossible,” Janet found herself saying. “Susan takes a nap in the afternoon.”

  “Janet!” her husband said.

  “I don’t think you understand,” the doctor said gently. “There may be a problem with her heart, and that’s what may have affected her growth.”

  But Janet understood perfectly. They were about to take Susan away from her. When she was taken into the X-ray department Janet had to look away. The technicians had fitted Susan into a sort of glass tube to keep her from moving, and inside the glass Susan looked tinier than ever and so beautiful it nearly broke Janet’s heart. She tried to think of a reason why she would be punished this way, and she knew it could only be that she hadn’t been a good enough mother. Not a real mother. She had resented the crying in the night sometimes, she had been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of dirty laundry one baby could generate. And now she was being punished, and what’s more, she deserved it.

  They discovered a congenital heart lesion. It had stopped Susan’s growth and made her delicate enough to catch so many colds. The valves of her heart were beyond repair. Janet and Lewis took her to Mount Sinai for a second opinion, but the second opinion was the same as the first. Susan would not last through her first year. The strange thing was that, if anything, Susan became more beautiful, and when Janet took her for walks in her stroller people turned and stared and some of them couldn’t stop themselves from coming right up to tell Janet what a lovely daughter she had. Janet herself looked much older. Lewis told her to take it easy, not to work so hard, to sleep more. But Janet just didn’t feel she had the time to waste on things like sleeping and eating. She only wanted to be with Susan. She spent all day playing with her, and didn’t bother with supper for Lewis or vacuuming the rugs. She taught Susan to eat cereal off a tiny demitasse spoon, to clap her hands together, to wave goodbye. One afternoon, when they were sitting together on the floor, Susan stopped playing with the soft rattle she held, looked up at Janet and said “ma.” Janet felt her heart break in half, and all that night Susan ran her new sound together, “amamamamam,” and even after she had closed her eyes, when Janet went into the nursery to check on her, Susan turned in her sleep and called out to her.

  In July Susan had a cold, and then a stomach virus; she just didn’t have the defenses to fight it off. And then, when it seemed that the virus had subsided, it suddenly got worse, and it happened so fast there was no time to think. One moment Susan was well enough to take solid foods, and the next she’d begun vomiting and her eyes had rolled upward so that all you could see was a milky white line beneath each lid. When they rushed her to the emergency ward she was absolutely limp, like a small doll who occasionally took a deep breath, and Janet thought to herself, This is a test. This is to get me ready for all I have to bear. Only a few hours after she was hooked up to an IV Susan revived, and as they took her home Janet realized that she hadn’t once allowed herself to cry. Even Lewis could do that, she had heard him in the bathroom, with the water in the sink running to mask the sound. But somehow, crying was an admission of what was happening to them, and Janet would never be ready for that.

  She died on the second Sunday in August, when the sky was cloudless and the temperature eighty-two degrees. Janet woke up at five in the morning and, lying next to her husband in bed, she knew. The light that morning was pearl-colored and soft. It was the sort of morning when summer is everywhere, in all the rooms of the house and in every backyard. Janet slipped out of bed, leaving her husband asleep. When he got up at seven, he found Janet in the nursery, rocking back and forth in the chair, holding the dead child. There were always blackbirds in East China, but this morning they called so loudly in the trees that they set all the neighborhood cats howling. Lewis sat down on the carpeted floor of the nursery and put his head in his wife’s lap, and because there was no longer any reason not to, Janet finally let herself cry.

  They couldn’t find a
coffin small enough, so they had one specially made. By the following morning all signs that a child had been in the house were gone: the crib and all the boxes of clothes were taken up to the attic; the photograph albums and toys were stored in the cellar behind an old metal sink. But all that first night Janet swore she heard a baby crying for its mother.

  The day that Lila had appeared at the front door Janet was suspicious, and as soon as Lila began to question her about her children, she was a hundred percent sure. It wasn’t unexpected—why shouldn’t Susan’s birth mother come back after all these years? Why shouldn’t she accuse her of murder? But Janet wasn’t about to admit anything, and when Lila finally left the house Janet double-locked the front door, and she didn’t dare take another breath until she heard Lila drive away.

  But even though she had tricked Lila into leaving, Janet couldn’t stop thinking about her, and that night she went down to the cellar and for the first time in twenty-seven years she opened the cardboard boxes. It was cold in the cellar, but when she opened the first box Janet felt a rush of heat, as if some of the air from that August had been trapped inside when Lewis first sealed the boxes. She put her flashlight down on the floor and took out the photo album. She had to force herself to go on past the first picture, taken the first week after they had brought her home. How could they have thought that anything so beautiful, so perfect, could last? In every photograph Susan seemed to be leaving them behind, calmly departing, and it suddenly seemed silly to Janet that she had ever thought of Susan as hers. It was just that for a little while she had been allowed to take care of her, and even if she told Lila the truth she couldn’t lose someone she had never really had.

  They could hear the scrape of the rake outside as Jason Grey cleared out the driveway. Lila sat perfectly still and although she thought to herself over and over, She’s a liar, she knew it was all true. It was the kind of truth you feel in your bones. The sudden knowledge that there was nothing at all wrong with Rae’s child nearly made Lila cry out loud; it was her own child who had surfaced from the bottom of the cup. It was her own bad fortune.

  “Maybe I’ve been waiting for you to come back for her all this time,” Janet Ross said quietly. “But you don’t have to tell me how I failed. Believe me. I know.”

  That August had been the best time in Lila’s life. The sunlight had been so bright you could see only certain things: a thin gold wedding band, the reedy stalks of orange lilies that grew by the back door, the line of Richard’s shoulder when he turned to her in bed.

  Janet Ross slid a photograph album across the coffee table between them.

  “I brought this for you,” she said.

  Lila planned to say, I don’t want it, my daughter is twenty-seven years old, today is her birthday, she lives somewhere right here in this town, she has children of her own, and she’s been waiting for me, every day she opens the back door and looks out across the lawn and expects to see me. But when she tried to speak she couldn’t, and though she tried to stop herself she reached for the album on the coffee table. The baby nearly jumped out at her. She was sitting in the backyard, on Janet Ross’s lap underneath a mimosa tree, and her eyes were so alive they couldn’t be held back by the confines of the paper. Lila could feel a sharp pain all along her left side. The child was stunning, but Lila had already decided—she was not her daughter.

  “She doesn’t look anything like me,” Lila said, and as she spoke she could feel the cold, round shape of the words drop from her mouth.

  “I brought this, too,” Janet said. She took a small white sweater out of her pocketbook and gently placed it on the coffee table. “She looked beautiful in anything you put on her, pastels, stripes, anything at all.”

  Jason Grey had never believed in using anything stronger than a sixty-watt bulb, though the pines made the parlor dark all day long. But even in the dim light, even though Janet Ross had turned her face away, Lila could tell that she was crying. Lila closed the photograph album and went to sit next to her on the couch. Janet wiped her tears with the backs of her hands and laughed.

  “If my husband goes down to the cellar before I clean up he’ll probably wonder if a robber’s been there. He’ll wonder why anyone in their right mind would pick those old boxes to go through.”

  Lila couldn’t take her eyes off Janet, and she found herself calmly thinking: So that’s how it feels. Janet’s sense of loss was all over her, in the way she buttoned her coat to leave, in the angle of her shoulders. When she compared her absolute lack of feeling to Janet’s grief, Lila couldn’t even bring herself to feel guilt—only uselessness. Outside it was even warmer than Los Angeles on a winter day; the earth had begun to steam, giving off moisture in little gasps. And Lila knew one thing for certain: She was not about to lose her daughter this way.

  When Lila slid the photograph album back onto Janet Ross’s lap, Janet looked over at her, confused.

  “I brought it for you,” Janet said.

  Maybe she should have felt grateful: here was the woman who sat up nights mixing formula, rocking back and forth in the rocking chair, not daring to go back to her own bed, even though the baby’s breathing was fine and the intercom was switched on. But the truth was that the one time in her life when Lila was about to do something that seemed selfless, she was feeling nothing at all.

  “You take this all home with you,” Lila insisted; “She was your daughter.”

  That evening Lila and Jason Grey sat in the kitchen and had a supper of coffee and sandwiches. They could feel the drop in the temperature and they knew it was about to snow.

  Jason had been watching her all evening and now he said carefully, “I liked that visitor of yours. Nice lady.”

  For the first time since she’d come back Lila realized just how cold this old house was.

  “I think I might go back to California,” she said.

  Jason nodded. “They’re predicting a hell of a February. Wherever you look you’re going to see snow.”

  “I don’t see how you stand it,” Lila said, and they both knew she wasn’t talking about the snow.

  “I’ll tell you what the hard part is,” Jason Grey said. “It’s not feeling Helen’s not with me—I feel like she’s with me all the time. It’s letting her go. After all, it’s pretty selfish trying to keep her here with me in this house, so every once in a while I just remind myself to let her go.”

  That night, before she went to bed, Lila went around the house, turning off all the lights. In the parlor, her father-in-law was already asleep, and when Lila went over to turn out the lamp near his cot she saw that Janet Ross had left behind the small white sweater, neatly folded on the coffee table. Lila hesitated, but then she picked it up and discovered that the sweater was warm, as if it had just been worn.

  She went upstairs, brushed her hair, and undressed; and when she got into bed she took the sweater in with her and held it against her chest. Everything in the room was faintly orange from the light of the kerosene heater, and outside the window, above the pine trees, the moon had a hazy ring around it, promising snow. Lila brought her knees up to her chest, and she rocked back and forth; in no time at all she was holding her daughter in her arms. She hadn’t changed since the day she was born, she wasn’t one minute older. And as Lila rocked her baby to sleep she closed her eyes and couldn’t help thinking that Jason Grey could do whatever he wanted. It wasn’t her baby that Janet Ross had been talking about, and she wasn’t about to let her daughter go.

  By morning nearly a foot of snow had fallen; the drifts reached the center of the front door and it took Lila and Jason Grey nearly two hours to dig the car out so that Jason could drive her to the airport. The last thing Lila had packed was the white wool sweater, and once they had gotten the car started, she kept the suitcase on her lap. At the edge of the driveway, just before they turned left onto the East China Highway, Lila felt a brief surge of pity for Janet Ross. But then, it didn’t really concern her. She had found her daughter after all, and all the way to
the airport she kept her left hand on her suitcase and she swore she could feel a heartbeat, as if she had hidden inside her suitcase a child so perfect and small no one else could see her, a baby who needed to be held all night, and gently rocked to sleep.

  PART FIVE

  THEY WERE ON THE FLOOR IN the living room, so intent on their breathing techniques that they hadn’t heard her come in. As she watched from the hallway, Lila felt a coldness settle around her. Rae lay on a bed of pillows, her knees drawn up, eyes closed. She exhaled rapidly, as if she were blowing out an endless row of matches. Richard was right beside her, staring at his watch and counting out the seconds. On the coffee table there was a tape recorder, but instead of music there was the echo of wind chimes, brittle and cool and clear. It was the kind of sound that went right through you and made you realize that if you weren’t lonely already, you would be soon.

  When she had had enough, Lila dropped her suitcase so that it fell to the floor with a thud. They both sat up, startled, and turned toward the hallway. It was late afternoon, and so quiet you could hear air currents move through the room. The light that came in through the drapes was opalescent; everyone got lost in its shadows, you had to blink twice just to see straight. Except Lila, to whom everything was now obvious. For the past six hours, as she traveled between New York and Los Angeles, Lila had been wondering how she could walk in and resume her old life. Now, in an instant, she saw that she simply could not.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” she told them.