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

by Alice Hoffman

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Jessup said finally, “but this is impossible. I’m not ready for this.”

  Lately, Rae had the sense that everything that was happening to her was really happening to someone else. She pinched her thigh until she could feel the bite of her own fingernails.

  “I appreciate the fact that this is a serious situation,” Jessup said. “I really do. But what the hell do you expect me to do about it?”

  She didn’t have an answer.

  “I’m not going to be somebody’s father.”

  If he were anyone but Jessup, Rae would have sworn he was about to cry.

  “Here I am in the middle of some sort of crisis and you come and tell me you’re pregnant.”

  She knew it for sure now, he was crying. She was glad the lights were out and she didn’t have to see it. She wasn’t angry with him any more, just tired.

  “We don’t have to talk about it now,” Rae told him. “We’ll talk tomorrow.” She put her arms around him and pretended not to know he was crying.

  “It’s not like I don’t miss you,” Jessup told her. “I don’t want to, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.”

  She held him until he fell asleep, and then she moved back to her side of the bed. Long after midnight, when she was finally able to sleep, Rae dreamed that she left Jessup in bed and went to the window. She opened it wider and climbed outside. She dropped down two stories, and her feet landed in the sand with a thud. Right away, even though it was dark, she saw the pawprints and she followed the tracks far into the desert. The sand was the color of moonlight and the cactus grew eight feet high. All she had to do was sit down, and the coyote came right over to her, curled up by her feet, and put its head in her lap.

  It didn’t seem to matter if the coyote was her pet, or if she’d been captured. When she reached down she could feel its heart beating against its ribs, and she felt elated to be so close to something so wild. She stayed in the desert all night, and by morning she had learned all of the coyote’s secrets: she knew which cactus were rich with hidden water, and how to follow a path along sharp, bone-colored rocks. She knew how to stand so still on the top of a high ridge that rabbits ran right past you, and hawks mistook you for stone and tried to light on your shoulders. At last she knew the moment when the night was so pure, you could fight it all you wanted and still—sooner or later—you’d throw back your head and howl.

  When she got back to the motel she climbed up the railing, then crouched on the window ledge. Everyone in the Holiday Inn was asleep, covered by white sheets, dreaming of home. There was sand all along the window ledge and it spilled onto the wall-to-wall carpeting. Once Jessup turned in his sleep, and Rae held her breath. But even though he opened his eyes briefly, he didn’t see her at the window, and he never heard her climb down onto the carpet, where she slept curled up at the very edge of the room.

  When Rae woke up it was dawn, and she knew that she had to get out. She needed fresh air, and breakfast, and a change of clothes. Jessup didn’t wake up when she ran the shower; he didn’t hear the window close, he didn’t hear the door. She would think about losing him later, but this morning all she wanted was to get across the desert before noon. She left the motel room exactly as it had been before she arrived. The air conditioner was still on; the pipes in the walls made a murmuring sound; in the bathroom there were a bottle of tequila, a package of disposable razors, a plastic container of Dixie cups. Only two things were missing when Rae left: the car keys were no longer on top of the night table, and out in the parking lot the space where Jessup had left the Oldsmobile the night before was empty. By the time Jessup woke up the asphalt in the parking lot was already beginning to sizzle. By noon it would reach a hundred and fifteen degrees. But by then Rae was already out on the freeway, and with all the windows in the Oldsmobile rolled down, the only thing she could feel was a perfect arc of wind.

  PART TWO

  ON THE NIGHT LILA GAVE birth to her daughter she had already walked up two flights of stairs before she realized she couldn’t go any farther. She held on to the iron banister and slowly sank to the floor. In the middle of a terribly cold winter, there had been an oddly warm week, with rain instead of snow, and everyone in the city seemed sluggish and out of sorts. Lila’s parents had come to agree that their daughter’s strange behavior was caused by a combination of the weather and the mysterious pains of being eighteen. Ever since autumn, Lila had refused to wear anything but the same wide, blue dress, which hung from her shoulders like a sack. She refused suppers and lunches, yet she looked heavy and she walked as if off balance. At night, the next-door neighbors could hear her crying, and when she finally slept nothing could wake her, not even a siren right outside the apartment building. No one had dared to ask Lila what was wrong for fear she might tell them. And so, it had not been very difficult for her to keep her pregnancy a secret. But on that day in January, when her legs gave out and she sat huddled on the second-floor landing, Lila knew there was just so much you could hide.

  Lila was expected home for dinner, but she sat in the stairwell for nearly an hour. Outside the sky filled with huge white clouds. The weather was changing that night, dropping five degrees an hour, and Lila tried to convince herself that the sudden shift in the atmosphere was what made her feel so exhausted and sick. In her calculations she had at least six more weeks to go. Lila was still stunned by what had happened to her, and every time the baby moved she was amazed all over again. On those rare days when she accepted that she was indeed pregnant, she could never quite believe she would actually give birth. Perhaps after nine months of pregnancy the process would reverse itself: the baby would slowly dissolve, forming, at the very last, a nearly perfect pearl, which Lila would carry inside her forever. But there on the stairs, Lila knew that something was happening to her. When she found the strength to stand up a wave began somewhere near her heart; it traveled downward in a rush, and then, without warning, exploded. Suddenly, Lila’s dress was drenched, from the waist to the hem, and as she climbed up the stairs a trail of warm water was left behind that would not begin to evaporate until the following day.

  Lila managed to get into the apartment unnoticed, then she undressed and crawled into bed. When her parents realized she was home they came to knock on her door, but by that time Lila’s voice was steady enough to call that she was really too tired to join them for dinner. She closed her eyes then, and waited, and she was in her own small bed, in that room where she’d slept every night of her life, when her labor pains began. At first it was nothing more than mild cramps, as if she had pulled the muscles in her back. But the cramps came and went in a regular pattern, and no matter how hard Lila willed the pain to stop it rose upward; it was climbing to the roof. The movement of time changed altogether; it seemed as if only two minutes had passed since Lila had managed to sneak into her room—but it was more than two hours later when the pain began to take on a life of its own. There was a steady rhythm it complied to, and as the pain gained control, Lila panicked. She jumped out of bed, pulled a blanket around her, then ran out of her room and into the hallway. Lila’s parents had long finished dinner, but her father was still at the table reading the newspaper, and her mother was returning the dishes to the cabinet in the dining room. When Lila’s mother saw her daughter in the hallway with a wool blanket wrapped around her and her dark hair flying wildly, she dropped a large platter which broke into a thousand pieces on the wooden floor.

  “Something’s wrong,” Lila screamed. Her voice did not sound at all like her voice, and though her parents were only a few feet away, Lila was certain that she had to yell to be heard. “I have to go to a hospital,” she cried. “Something’s happening to me.”

  Lila’s mother ran over and put a hand on her daughter’s forehead to check for fever, but a strong contraction came that made Lila drop down and crouch on the floor. Through the wave of pain, Lila could hear her mother shrieking, and the moment she was able to stand again her mother sl
apped her face so hard that Lila could feel her neck snap backward. It was then Lila’s parents began to argue and accuse each other of stupidity, lunacy, and every other parental crime possible. They nearly forgot that Lila was there in the room with them. At last, her mother and father both agreed that an ambulance’s siren was too deep a shame for them to endure, and so Lila’s cousin, who was a nurse in the emergency room at Beekman Hospital, would have to be called.

  At that point, Lila didn’t really care what was decided. It didn’t matter that her mother was crying hot tears as she telephoned Lila’s cousin, or that her father had already left the apartment, even though he had no place to go—too humiliated to sit in the lobby or ask a neighbor for a glass of water or tea, he went to the stairwell and sat there, and prayed that no one he knew would see him. Lila let them make all the decisions. When they refused to take her to the hospital, she went back to her room and knelt by the side of the bed. After a while, she put her face down on the cold sheet and gripped the mattress with both hands. She felt herself slipping into something dark, and each time a contraction came her waist was ringed with a band of fire. Each time the band grew hotter, until finally it threatened to burn right through her spine. One thing Lila knew: she could not live through this kind of suffering. But even now, she didn’t dare scream and bring the neighbors running. She simply begged for someone to help her, and although her mother must have heard her she did nothing more than come into the hallway and quietly close the bedroom door.

  The night grew so cold that when it began to rain the drops froze the moment they hit the sidewalk. There were hundreds of accidents: cars and buses skidded on the icy avenues, lights in hotel rooms flickered as generators came to a halt, pipes froze and then burst, and every frail tree in the city was hidden beneath a shower of ice. Up in her room, Lila was surrounded by black fire. She might have slipped into the darkness forever if her cousin Ann hadn’t arrived a little after midnight. The bedroom door opened slowly, and the scraping of wood against wood sounded like the flapping of some huge bird’s wings. Lila gasped when the sudden light from the hallway filled her room. For one calm moment Lila wondered if she had imagined the pain, and she watched as her cousin took off her gray wool coat and her leather boots. Before the bedroom door was closed Lila had enough time to look out and see her mother peer into the bedroom. At least, Lila thought it was her mother—she wore her mother’s clothes, and was her mother’s shape and size. But if it really had been her mother, wouldn’t she have run into the room and thrown her arms around her daughter and tried to save her? Lila blinked and strained to see, but the figure in the hallway just grew shadowier, and when Lila’s cousin walked toward the door she blocked the light, and then there weren’t even any shadows. There was nothing at all.

  When the door closed the sound echoed. Lila could actually feel the sound somewhere beneath her skin. Immediately the room was airless; the heat in the radiator poured out until it was impossible to breathe. That was when Lila knew she couldn’t have this baby.

  “I’m sorry,” she told her cousin. “They made you come here for nothing. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going through with this.”

  Ann had been a nurse for eleven years—long enough to know she had better not tell Lila that every woman in hard labor had made the exact same pronouncement.

  “I can’t do this!” Lila screamed.

  Every neighbor on the floor above could hear her now for all she cared. Her contractions had been coming two minutes apart for some time, but now something changed. She could no longer tell the difference between one contraction and the next; the pain began to run together in a single line of fire. As each contraction rose to its highest peak, hot liquid poured out between Lila’s legs. She couldn’t sit, or lie down—she couldn’t stand. Ann helped her onto the bed and examined her. By the time she was through, Lila was so wet that the sheets beneath her were soaked.

  “Give me something,” she begged. “Give me a shot. Put me out. Do anything.”

  The pain owned her now; it owned the earth and the air and at its center was an inferno. She was in the darkest time before birth, transition, and even though she didn’t know its name, Lila knew, all of a sudden, that she could not go back. There was nothing to go back to, there was only this pain—and it was stronger than she was. It was swallowing her alive.

  She wanted Hannie, that was all there was to it. In the past few weeks she had considered going to see her a hundred times, but a hundred times her pride got in the way, and now it was too late. She tried to imagine the stiff black skirts, and the clucking sound Hannie made in the back of her throat, and couldn’t. There was nothing but this room, and inside the room there was only pain. And even if Hannie had been right beside her, Lila would still have been alone. That was the unbearable part of this pain—no one could accompany you, no one could share it, and the absolute loneliness of it was nearly enough to drive you mad.

  Ann went to the bathroom to dampen some washcloths, and when she came back she found Lila standing by the window, looking out. The sidewalk was three stories down, and from this distance the ice that had formed on the cement seemed as cool and delicious as a deep, blue bay in Maine. Ann ran and turned her away from the window. It did no good to think of an escape, or even to wish for one. This was the center of it, and all you had to do was stand your ground—you could not even think about giving up.

  When she saw the damp washcloths, Lila grabbed one out of her cousin’s hand and sucked out the water. She was dying of thirst. She would have given anything for a piece of ice, a lemonade, a cool place where she could drift into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  “Please,” Lila said to her cousin.

  “Just remember,” Ann said, “I’m not going to leave you. I’m going to stay right here with you till the end.”

  “You can’t leave me!” Lila cried, terrified and misunderstanding.

  “I won’t,” Ann told her. “I’m right here.”

  Lila threw her arms around Ann’s neck. She had never wanted to be closer to anyone. Again and again she whispered “please,” but she knew there was no one who could save her. And then something let loose inside Lila, and it was simply beyond her powers to hold it back. She felt a terrible urge to push this thing inside of her out, and when Ann told her she couldn’t push yet, she started to cry. Ann showed her how to pant—it was a trick to fool her body into believing it was breathing that she must concentrate on—but even then Lila’s tears ran into the back of her throat and nearly made her choke. Nothing was working, she couldn’t even pant; she took in more and more air until she started to hyperventilate. Ann began to breathe along with her, and eventually Lila was able to slow her panting to match her cousin’s. Lila stared into Ann’s eyes and the room fell away from her; the city no longer existed. She fell deeper into those eyes—they were the universe, filled with energy and unbelievable light. Lila heard a voice tell her to get back onto the bed. She didn’t feel herself move, and yet there she was, on those damp white sheets with her legs pulled up.

  “It’s time,” Lila heard someone say to her. “Now you can push.”

  For a moment everything was clear. Lila recognized the ceiling in her bedroom, and the face of her cousin who was a hospital nurse. It seemed that a serious mistake had been made. This could not possibly be happening to her.

  It was day now, but the air was so cold that the dawn was blue. Lila sat up in bed; she leaned back against the pillows and pulled her legs up as far as they could go. She pushed for the first time, and when she did she was horrified to hear her own voice. Surely, a sound like that would tear a throat apart. She pushed again, and again, but after more than a hour there was still the same enormous pressure. The only difference was now Lila was so exhausted that she couldn’t even scream. All she wanted was for this horrible burning thing inside her to come out. She found herself thinking the same odd phrase over and over. It’s only your body, she told herself. It was her flesh that had betrayed her, her blood tha
t was on fire. The solution was simple and took only an instant. As her cousin leaned over her and wiped her face with a washcloth, as dawn reflected through windows all over the city, Lila left her body behind.

  Her spirit leapt up into the pure white air. The utter joy of such a leap was almost too much for her. Lila rose upward, guided by a perfect beam of light. Below her, she could see her body propped up on two pillows, she could see that her eyes were closed, and that she held her breath as she pushed down with all the strength she had left. But how could she be concerned with a body that twisted and groaned, something that was so far away? Up here, in this strange new atmosphere, everything was silent. The air was so cold it crystallized, and each time Lila opened her mouth to breathe it quenched her thirst. There was the scent of something much sweeter than roses, and Lila wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that her spirit had taken the shape of a bird. What else but a blackbird could swoop so gracefully above a room of pain?

  “So now you’re free,” someone was saying to Lila. “Now you know that absolute freedom of leaving your body behind.”

  “It was so easy to do,” Lila said. “How could anything be this easy?”

  Far below her, Lila could hear her cousin ask who on earth she was talking to. But Lila didn’t bother to answer. Any moment she might have to return to her body, each second was too precious to waste. The blue dawn was nothing compared to the white light that Lila had discovered. And when the time came for her to return to her body, Lila felt such a terrible sorrow that for an instant she thought she might choose not to return at all. She was floating just above herself, still undecided, when she suddenly found herself moved by the struggle beneath her. Her body’s shallow breathing and the beat of her own heart filled Lila with pity; with one tender motion she slipped back inside her own flesh.

  This time when she pushed, something hard moved so that it was nearly out. Lila reached her hands between her legs and felt the soft hair on the very top of the baby’s head.