Property Of, the Drowning Season, Fortune's Daughter, and At Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  “I have to go,” Rae told her mother.

  “I’m in the middle,” Carolyn said. “Don’t you see?”

  Jessup was at the front door; he knocked once, and when Rae didn’t answer he fumbled for the key.

  “I just called to let you know I was all right,” Rae said, but she wasn’t—she’d never felt more alone in her life. Any second Jessup would walk through the door—if he discovered that she had called Boston there might be a scene. He might tell her to take the bus back home if she missed the place so much, and now Rae knew that she couldn’t—by now they had gotten rid of the furniture in her bedroom, they had probably changed the locks on all the doors.

  “Is that the only reason you called?” Carolyn said in a small voice, as though she actually expected Rae to say that she missed her.

  “I really have to go,” Rae said, and she hung up the phone and ran to get the door just as Jessup was letting himself in.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. She went into the living room and sat in the dark, the phone balanced on her lap. She dialed the area code for Boston, and then the number for the local weather report. It was much colder in Boston—forty degrees—and by morning a pale frost would appear on the lawns and between cabbage leaves in backyard gardens. On nights when she couldn’t sleep, all Rae had to do was ask Jessup to hold her and he would; he might even sit up with her and watch a movie on TV if she asked the right way. But right then, the only person Rae wanted was her mother. If she closed her eyes she could smell Carolyn’s perfume, she could feel how cold the windowpanes were in her third-floor bedroom on nights when the moon was full and a web of ice formed on the glass.

  Later, when it was nearly dawn, Rae went into the bathroom. When she discovered a line of blood on her thigh, she sat down on the rim of the tub and cried. The sky had turned pearl gray and the crickets were still calling when Rae got into bed beside Jessup. She could tell he was dreaming; he held on to the pillow so tightly that his knuckles were white. As Rae pulled the sheet over them, Jessup woke up.

  “I was dreaming,” he said.

  “I know,” Rae told him. “I was watching you.”

  “It was summer,” Jessup said. “There were a million stars in the sky and I was waiting outside your house, but you didn’t see me.”

  Rae put her arms around him. “I saw you,” she told him, but Jessup was already back asleep.

  After that night, Rae risked the subject of children every now and then, but Jessup’s reaction was always the same.

  “Take a good look at me,” he would tell her. “Do I look like somebody’s father?”

  Rae had to admit that he didn’t. Even when she really tried she couldn’t imagine him getting up at two in the morning, or changing a diaper, or shopping for a crib.

  “All a baby will do is come between us,” Jessup warned her. “Is that what you want? Because if that’s what you want let’s go into the bedroom right now and make the biggest mistake we ever made.”

  But this time there was a difference. This time Jessup wasn’t around to convince Rae that it was a mistake. Jessup was out in the desert where the moonlight turned nights colder than any winter in Boston. He was turning in his sleep, unaware that Rae had already decided. Whether he liked it or not he was about to become somebody’s father.

  Rae took the bus to Barstow on a day when it was impossible to look at the sky and not think of heaven. After a while there was less traffic and the road opened up. Now, each passenger who got on brought some of the desert into the bus, so that a fine cover of sand drifted across the aisles. Even through the dusty windows you could tell how blue the sky was, and all along the roadside there were tuberous wildflowers that were so sweet they attracted bees the size of a man’s hand.

  At noon the sky turned white with heat, and Rae saw her first real mirage. There was a line of coyotes along a ridgetop, but when she blinked they disappeared. There was nothing in the distance but pink sand and low violet clouds, and of course it wasn’t the right time of day for coyotes anyway. They waited for the temperature to fall before they came down from the mountains. Then they walked in single file, circling deserted adobe houses, making a noise in the back of their throats that made you think they were dying of loneliness.

  When Rae got off the bus the air was so dry that it stung. She found a phone booth and called every motel listed; the film crew was registered at the Holiday Inn on Route 17, but the desk clerk told her that everyone had gone out on location. Rae took a cab to the Holiday Inn. She’d hoped to get into Jessup’s room so she could take a shower and order room service before he got back, but the desk clerk refused to give her the key. After all, what rights did she have—they weren’t even married.

  By the time she had ordered a grilled cheese sandwich in the coffee shop, Rae was furious. It seemed as if Jessup had purposely not married her just so that one day she’d be kept out of his room at the Holiday Inn. She had wanted to get married all along, but Jessup felt it was a meaningless act. What difference did a piece of paper make—he pointed out his own father, who hadn’t bothered with a divorce from Jessup’s mother before disappearing, and then clinched his argument by bringing up Rae’s parents, whom he called the most miserable couple on earth.

  “We’d be different,” Rae had promised. Carolyn had been married in a blue suit, as if she had already given up hope. Rae planned to wear a long white dress.

  “We already are different,” Jessup had said. “We’re not married.”

  After thinking about it, Rae had panicked—if Jessup died she couldn’t even legally arrange for his funeral. Dressed in black, she’d have to stand on a runway at Los Angeles Airport and watch as his body was shipped back to his mother in Boston.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jessup had told her. “If you’re really concerned I’ll send my mother a postcard and tell her you get to keep the Oldsmobile and my body.”

  Rae left the coffee shop and went to sit by the pool. Had she been allowed up to his room, she would have shown him. By now she would have ordered baskets of fruit and chilled champagne. Instead, she found some change at the bottom of her purse and got a soda from the vending machine. The heat rose higher and higher and no one dared to venture out of the air-conditioned rooms, but there she was, on a plastic chaise longue beside the pool—all because he had never bothered to marry her. The fact that he was out on location was what really upset her, because there was absolutely nothing worse than taking a long bus trip and having it end with no one there to meet you.

  The last time Rae had taken such a trip, she was eight years old. She and Carolyn were going out to a rented summer house in Wellfleet; they had left a few days early so that everything could be in order by the time Rae’s father drove down for the weekend. The trip had been a disaster—Carolyn got sick and the bus driver had to pull off onto the shoulder of Route 3. As the other passengers watched, Carolyn stood on the asphalt and tried to breathe.

  “It’s nothing serious,” she told Rae when she returned, but Rae noticed that her mother was gripping the upholstered seat in front of them, and that her fingers were swollen and white.

  By the time they got to Wellfleet, Rae felt sick, too. Carolyn had misplaced the key and they had to climb into the house through an unlatched window. Rae stood in the middle of the dark living room as her mother stumbled over to the wall to find the light switch. She could actually feel the goose bumps rise on her arms and legs. Later, Carolyn made up a bed for her with clean sheets, but Rae couldn’t sleep. She could hear crickets and the hum that lightning bugs make when they’re trapped in the mesh of a screen window. The walls in the house sagged and creaked, and there was an owl’s nest in the chimney so that a muffled hooting echoed from inside the bricks. Carolyn couldn’t sleep either; she came into Rae’s room late at night and sat at the foot of the bed.

  “It’s not an accident that you have red hair,” Carolyn said. She lit a cigarette, and in the dark the smoke spiraled up to the ceiling. “When I was pregnant
with you I bought a pair of red high heels made in Italy. Even though I couldn’t really wear them because my feet had swollen, sometimes when I was alone I put them on and just wore them around the house. That’s the reason you have red hair.”

  “No it isn’t,” Rae said.

  The hum of the lightning bugs was growing fainter, although Rae could still see patches of light caught in the window.

  “I’ll bet you anything it’s the reason,” Carolyn said.

  “What if you had worn purple shoes?” Rae challenged.

  “You would have had black hair that was so dark it would look nearly purple at night.”

  “Green?” Rae asked.

  “Pale blond hair that turned green every time you swam in a pool with any chlorine in it.”

  By the time she fell asleep Rae had forgotten about the business on the bus, and the sound of the owls had become as regular as a heartbeat. But that weekend, when Rae’s father drove down, Rae could tell that something was wrong between her parents. Usually, they argued—now they just didn’t speak. The silence in the house was suffocating, but then, on Sunday, Rae found something on the front porch that made her think August wouldn’t be so terrible after all. It was a cardboard shoebox, and inside was a pair of ruby-colored plastic beach shoes. When Rae slipped them on they fit perfectly, as if they’d been made for her.

  She meant to go inside and thank her mother for the gift, but the shoes simply had to be used, so she walked past the salt marsh, down to the beach. Even when she ran into the water she kept her shoes on, and she walked for nearly two miles and didn’t come home until dinnertime. Rae went around to the back of the house where she could rinse off her shoes under a metal faucet, but she stopped by a mock orange shrub that was covered with white flowers. Carolyn was out there on the back porch, and she was breathing in that same way she had when she’d asked the bus driver to pull over. Rae’s father was standing behind the screen door to the kitchen, looking out.

  “If you’re so miserable why don’t you leave,” he told Carolyn.

  The sky was as blue as ink, and when Rae licked her lips she could taste salt. There was a slight wind, and Carolyn’s skirt rose up, like the tail end of a kite. Right then what Rae wished for more than anything was that her mother would have the courage to take Rae and get back on the bus and leave him.

  “But if you stay,” Rae’s father said through the screen door, “I don’t want to hear any more complaints. I’d just as soon not talk at all.”

  In the shadows by the side of the house, Rae crouched even lower and held her breath. She expected Carolyn to call out her name, and when she did Rae would stand up and her mother would grab her hand; then they’d run past the high white dunes, and keep running until they reached the center of town.

  But Carolyn didn’t call out her name, she just stood at the porch banister, then she turned and went inside, and the screen door slammed behind her. Even then, Rae could tell when someone had given up, and as she stood out in the yard she felt betrayed. Later, when she went inside, Carolyn was setting the table for dinner as if nothing had happened, and Rae’s father was starting a fire in the fireplace to get some of the chill out of the house. As they ate canned soup and tunafish sandwiches, Rae could hear the sand crabs outside, scrambling through the dunes. When a log in the fireplace popped Rae was certain that Carolyn shuddered. That was when Rae decided she would never trust her mother again; she could never love someone so weak, someone who couldn’t even tell her husband not to light a fire because on the top of the chimney there was an owl’s nest made of sea grass and straw.

  All that summer Rae kept to herself, even during the week when her father wasn’t there. She hid the red shoes at the back of the closet in her room, and when they left Wellfleet at the end of August, Rae left the red shoes behind, relieved to know that even if they rented the same house again, those shoes would never fit her the following year.

  As she waited for Jessup by the pool Rae fell asleep and she dreamed about the house in Wellfleet. In her dream, Carolyn stood out on the back porch. It was late at night and the sky was black. As Rae watched, her mother disappeared, slowly dissolving in the salt air until there was nothing left on the porch but some fine white powder. When Rae woke up it was after five and the lounge chair had left ridges all along the side of her face. There was absolute silence, except for the wind and the sound of metal chimes hung along the outdoor balcony.

  Every room on the second floor opened out to a painted blue walkway, and each room had a view of the pool. But when Jessup had gotten back an hour earlier, he hadn’t bothered with the view. He had picked up a bottle of tequila after work, and as soon as he got into his room he pulled the drapes closed and ran a bath. When Rae knocked on his door, Jessup was sitting in a tub of cool water, his feet propped up on the far rim. He was drinking tequila out of a Dixie cup, and wondering why lifting a few pieces of sound equipment had left him feeling like an old man. He heard the first knock on the door but decided to ignore it. Tonight he didn’t care about extra pay, he wasn’t working overtime. He leaned his head against the cool ceramic tiles behind him and listened to the echo of water running through the pipes as someone on the floor above him ran the shower.

  The longer she stood out there in the sun, the more Rae felt like crying. She had promised herself she would be calm; she had gone over this a hundred times in her head, and she planned to argue her case reasonably. But she didn’t feel reasonable. She was certain that Jessup was in because the desk clerk had assured her he had picked up his key, and Rae wound up pounding on the door. When Jessup finally answered he had a towel wrapped around his waist and he was dripping wet. Rae walked right past him and sat in a tweed armchair. The room was small enough for her to lift her legs and reach the bed; she rested her shoes on the clean bedspread and looked up at him. Jessup had closed the door behind her, and now he was trapped. The only way for him to get anywhere was to jump over Rae’s legs. And there was something else in Rae’s favor—Jessup wasn’t wearing clothes and somehow that made things fairer.

  He sat down on the bed and put a hand on Rae’s ankle. “Look who’s here.”

  “You bet I’m here,” Rae said.

  The air conditioner was on, and the sound got between them. It was difficult to hear, and neither of them wanted to shout. In spite of herself, Rae thought he looked better than ever—he certainly wasn’t wasting away.

  “I wish I could explain some of the things I’ve done lately,” Jessup said. “But all I can say is I’m going through some sort of crisis.”

  They both laughed at that, and Rae laughed a little too long. Before they knew it, she was crying.

  “Come on, Rae,” Jessup said. “Please.”

  “Goddamn you,” Rae said.

  Jessup shook his head sadly. “I know,” he agreed.

  Rae took a shower while Jessup got dressed. She rehearsed the right way to tell him she was pregnant, but the thing was she didn’t quite believe it herself. She didn’t look any different; it could very well be a mistake. When Rae got out of the shower and dressed again there was sand in her clothes and it stuck to her damp skin. She couldn’t stop herself from imagining the worst. What if a monster was growing inside of her, something made out of blood and flesh that wasn’t quite human. It might be her punishment; it had to happen to somebody—somebody’s baby had to be misshapen, somebody had to die in a delivery room and be wrapped up in a stained sheet, somebody’s lover had to leave her when he found out she was pregnant.

  That night they went out to dinner; they ordered hamburgers and played the jukebox and tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. On the drive back to the Holiday Inn a wind came up suddenly; sand whipped around the Oldsmobile and Jessup had to switch on the windshield wipers in order to see the road. Rae heard the sound of wind chimes each time they passed a house or a trailer, and even though Jessup told her that people in the desert believed the chimes brought good luck, the sound put Rae on edge. The temperature had dropp
ed nearly twenty degrees, but when they reached the motel the wind had begun to die down and Rae saw millions of stars above them. Jessup opened the door to his room, but Rae just leaned over the balcony railing. The night was black and white and so breathtakingly clear that she felt she had never seen the sky before.

  Finally, Rae went in. She took off all her clothes and got under the covers. Jessup left a wake-up call for seven, then took off his boots, undressed, and turned out the lights. After he’d gotten into bed he didn’t touch her.

  “I’ve been trying to think of ways to explain what went wrong,” Jessup said. He reached for his cigarettes in the dark, and when he lit a match Rae blinked in the sudden light.

  “It’s like I’ve been dreaming all these years and I suddenly woke up,” Jessup said. “And here I am. Almost thirty.”

  The window in the room was open. It was the time when coyotes came down from the ridgetops; you could hear them howling as the moon rose higher in the sky. As she lay in bed Rae listened to the wind chimes out on the balcony; cars pulled into the parking lot, they idled, then cut their engines.

  “I’m glad you woke up,” Rae said bitterly.

  “Don’t take it personally,” Jessup told her. “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, if you’re planning to leave me we may have a problem,” Rae said. She could feel Jessup’s weight on the mattress; each time he breathed they shifted a little closer together. “The problem is,” Rae said, “I’m pregnant.”

  Jessup reached for a glass ashtray and stubbed his cigarette out. When he put his head back on the pillow, Rae knew it was over.

  “Are you saying you think you’re pregnant or you know you’re pregnant?”

  “I know,” Rae said.

  “There are plenty of times you say you know something, and then I find out you’ve made a mistake.”

  “Jessup,” Rae said. “I know.”

  Jessup sat up in bed with his back toward her. In the room next door someone turned on the television and muted voices drifted through the wall.