One day in January, Lila went up to the bedroom and didn’t come down. She stayed in bed for three days and nights, and every time she breathed she felt a terrible pain in her abdomen. She refused to speak to Richard, and she would not see a doctor. Richard couldn’t bring himself to go to work and he wasn’t allowed in his own room. He sat for hours at the kitchen table, unable to eat, not understanding why he felt as though he had lost his wife.
On the fourth day Helen spent the morning crying, then she went upstairs. She walked into Lila’s room without bothering to knock and sat at the foot of the bed.
“You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong,” Helen said. “Just tell me—is leaving New York the only thing that will cure you?”
Lila hadn’t talked for such a long time that when she spoke her voice was thick.
“It’s the only thing,” she told her mother-in-law. “If I stay here I’ll die.”
Helen took the suitcases out of the closet and packed Lila’s and Richard’s clothes. She telephoned Jason at the gas station and asked him to bring home the station wagon he’d been working on to replace their old Chrysler. Then Helen went downstairs to the kitchen and closed the door behind her. While Jason Grey and Richard packed up the station wagon and helped Lila down to the car, Helen baked a honey cake. She used almonds, and sweet brown pears, and when it was done she carefully placed it in a tin that she carried out to the car. She handed the cake to Lila through the window of the station wagon, and she kissed Richard twice before she let him go. Lila held the cake tin on her lap, as if its heat could make her well. When they had been on the Long Island Expressway for over an hour, she suddenly begged Richard to drive into Manhattan.
“I understand,” Richard had said. “You want to see your parents before we go.”
But that hadn’t been it at all. It seemed so simple now—Lila would run into the apartment and shake her mother by her shoulders until she divulged the name and address of whoever had stolen Lila’s daughter. Then all Lila had to do was go back out to Richard and tell him that her mother had insisted they take a little cousin with them to raise as their own. Once they reached the house where her daughter was being held, Lila would slip through the front door, wrap the child in a warm blanket, then run as fast as she could. All the way to California she would hold her daughter on her lap—she wouldn’t let go of her, not until the western sky opened up in front of them as they sped past black hills and corrals full of half-wild horses.
When they got to the apartment building, Richard couldn’t find a parking space, so he circled the block. Lila got out of the car, but once she was standing on the sidewalk her sense of expectation disappeared. She went inside the building and climbed the three flights of stairs, but when she reached the apartment and knocked on the door there was no answer. She knocked again and again, but each time she did she felt more defeated—in the cold hallway her plans to kidnap her daughter seemed ludicrous, and in the end, when she walked downstairs and back out on to the street, she was relieved that no one had been home.
She could see the station wagon half a block away, stuck in traffic. It was then that she happened to turn back to take one last look at the apartment building, and when she looked upward she saw the curtains moving in the window of the parlor. Up on the third floor, hidden behind lace curtains, Lila’s mother gazed downward. As soon as she realized Lila saw her, she dropped the curtains and moved away. But even then Lila could see her mother’s shadow, a line of black pressed against the white curtains.
When the station wagon pulled up to the curb, Lila got in, leaned her head against the seat, and wept.
“They may not be the best in the world, but they’re still your parents,” Richard said. “It’s not easy to leave people behind.”
Lila reached down and lifted up the hem of her dress to wipe her eyes.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Richard asked. “We don’t have to go to California—we can still turn back.”
Without bothering to look, Lila knew that her mother was still watching her. She moved over so that Richard could put his arm around her, then she closed her eyes as they drove toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and in no time at all they had left New York behind them for good.
At first it seemed as if it was only a matter of time. But a year passed, then two, then three, and Lila still hadn’t gotten pregnant. She bathed in tubs filled with warm water and vitamin E, she forced herself to eat calf’s liver twice a week, she gave up caffeine and chocolate and spices. Every morning, before she got out of bed, she took her temperature, and she kept a chart of her ovulation taped to the back of her closet door. But in her heart, Lila knew that she’d never be given another chance; each time Richard talked about the child they would someday have Lila grew more desperate, and by the time she turned thirty she had given up hope.
The nights they made love, Lila could never sleep. She waited until Richard’s breathing grew deep, and then she carefully got out of bed. On these nights she went out to the garden, and she sat in a black wrought-iron chair beneath the lemon tree. She never bothered with slippers, even though the patio was cold and snails moved across the slate, leaving slick trails behind. There had been something wrong with the garden from the start; the neighbors had warned them that everything you wanted to grow simply wouldn’t, but renegade plants would reappear each time you pulled them out by the roots. At the rear of the yard, along a low wooden fence, the previous owner had foolishly planted a passion flower vine that was now so tangled it had begun to strangle itself with its own flowers. At the time of night when Lila went to sit in the yard it was almost possible to hear the vine growing, wrapping itself tighter around the fence.
In the mornings Lila climbed back into bed, and Richard never seemed to notice that she’d been gone all night. He still talked about the son they would have someday, the daughter who would look just like Lila, but each year he sounded a little less convinced. When they had been married for fifteen years, Richard said, “Let’s say we can never have any children. Is that the worst that can happen to us?”
She told him it wasn’t, but secretly Lila believed that it was. Childless women began to disgust her—she could sense their brittle presence in the supermarket and the bakery, she could look right through them and see white dust and bones. The worst times were when Richard’s parents came out to visit. The older they got, the more they wanted grandchildren, but even they knew enough to stop asking when. The year Lila turned thirty-nine was the first time Helen Grey visited without advising them that the guest room would make a perfect nursery. But every now and then during that visit, Lila would look up and find her mother-in-law watching her, as if she were the only person who really knew just how badly Lila had cheated her son.
That was when Lila began to do readings again. It wasn’t for the money—Richard had bought his own shop—it was because of the comfort she found in reaching into someone else’s sorrow. She began carefully, starting with her neighbors, who were shocked by her sudden interest in them. In time, Lila’s clients swore by her. Her advice was noncommittal but sound, and Lila actually found she was pleased when her clients grew to depend on her, waiting to make travel plans or give a husband an ultimatum until Lila could read their tea leaves. It was one of her regular customers, Mrs. Graham from around the corner, who brought her niece to Lila’s one afternoon. The red tablecloth was set out and the water boiled by the time the two women arrived. Lila read for Mrs. Graham first—the question of whether or not to put her ailing dog to sleep was evaded until next time—and then for the niece. The niece had come from a bad marriage in Chicago, and she was already reconsidering the separation from her husband.
“What I want to know is will he walk all over me if I go back?” she asked Lila. “I give in to him a lot, and that’s my problem. If he tells me he’s spent his paycheck I say, Why that’s all right—but inside I’d like to kill him.”
Lila nodded and poured the water over the tea leaves; she could tell that the
niece was going back to her husband to give him another chance. She watched the leaves float to the surface without much interest, but when the niece had finished her tea Lila took one look inside the cup and immediately began to cry. Lila’s clients sat on the edge of their seats, and they both let out a whoop when Lila informed the niece that she was pregnant.
“Wait till I tell my husband,” the niece said. “He is going to flip out when I tell him.”
After they left, Lila went into the bathroom and ran the cold water, and from then on she refused to open the door if Mrs. Graham came for a reading. All the rest of that month, Lila felt shaky, and each time she closed her eyes she saw the small motionless child in the center of the cup. It was not as if she had not seen death during readings before, but this was different, this was enough to break your heart. She grew careful; if a client even mentioned that she was considering pregnancy, Lila never read for her again. But she was tricked the following year by a high-school student who had accompanied her mother to a reading. Lila had carelessly poured a cup of tea for the girl so that she’d be occupied during her mother’s reading. It wasn’t until the reading was over, and Lila reached for the girl’s cup to carry it into the kitchen, that she saw the symbol again. At first she was paralyzed, but when the mother went out to start her car, Lila found an excuse to pull the girl back into the house. After she’d told the girl she was pregnant, Lila was so upset she was the one who seemed to need comforting.
“I’ll be okay,” the girl promised Lila. “Really.”
“Did you know you were pregnant?” Lila asked her.
“I sort of thought I was,” the girl admitted.
Lila simply couldn’t bring herself to tell any more of what she’d seen, and she couldn’t bear to listen as the girl confided that she planned to enter a special high school program for mothers, not when she was so certain that the child would not live.
That night Lila had a fever of a hundred and three and when she woke up the next morning the bed was soaked with tears. After that she almost gave up the readings altogether, particularly at times when she happened to look in the mirror and saw how much she looked like the old fortune-teller in New York. But she continued to see her clients. She managed to convince herself that it was just a job like any other and that she couldn’t possibly know what the future would bring, although now and then she still seemed to know more than she wanted to.
Late one night, in the middle of a warm, dry winter, the telephone suddenly rang. Lila felt certain that something had happened to Helen. She sat up in bed, rigid, while Richard ran to answer it. The air was so warm that the clothes Lila had hung up to dry overnight were no longer even damp, but when Richard came back into the bedroom he found that Lila had wrapped a heavy woolen blanket around her shoulders.
“It’s my mother,” Richard said. “She’s in the hospital.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, but when Lila went to sit next to him he didn’t seem to notice.
“She’s dying,” Richard said.
“Oh, no,” Lila said, but what she really meant was Please don’t leave me.
“I have to go tonight,” Richard told her. “Otherwise it may be too late for me to see her again.”
Lila called the airline for a reservation; then she took out the suitcase and packed a week’s worth of Richard’s clothes.
They were standing by the front door, waiting for the taxi, when Lila thought she heard the sound of bees.
“Come with me,” Richard said to her.
But for Lila New York had dissolved; it wasn’t even on the map any more.
“It’s better if you go alone,” Lila told Richard. “You’re her only son. You’re the one she wants to see.”
“I’m going to give my father hell,” Richard said. “He should have told me before.”
“Don’t do that,” Lila said. “You know your father.”
That was when Richard started to cry.
“Oh, don’t,” Lila begged him. “What good will it do you?”
“I just don’t see how he’s going to go on without her,” Richard said. “That’s the part that really gets me.”
When the taxi came, Lila walked Richard out to the porch, but she couldn’t watch him drive away. It was the first time since their marriage that they had been apart. But although she dreaded being alone, Lila needed this time by herself: this was the week her period was due, and if she missed it again it would make three times in a row. Every morning Lila checked to see if the sheets were stained. On the fifth day there was one wild moment when she actually thought she might be pregnant, but of course she was not. She sat by the open window, and as night began to fall she grew flushed, and her nerves seemed much too delicate—she could feel them jump beneath her skin.
She should have been relieved; for years she had tried to get pregnant just to please Richard, she had never really wanted any child other than the one she had lost. An early menopause simply saved her from trying to love another child in a way she never could. But now that it was truly over, Lila cared much more than she should have. She went into mourning: when neighbors knocked on the door, she didn’t answer, she didn’t even bother to get dressed, and when Richard phoned from New York, Lila no longer recognized his voice. Eight days later, when Richard returned, Lila knew that neither of them would ever be the same.
It was early evening when the taxi pulled up. Lila was already in bed asleep when Richard came to lie down next to her. He woke Lila by watching her, and she came to him from a dream where all the furniture in her parents’ apartment had been replaced with woven mats, and tea was being served from a silver samovar in the middle of the floor.
“Was she in pain?” Lila asked when she woke.
“She didn’t remember me,” Richard said.
“Of course she did,” Lila told him. “You’re her only son.”
Richard didn’t have the strength to unbutton his shirt—he had been wearing the same clothes for two days.
“The hedges are all overgrown,” he said. “I noticed it first thing when I got out of the taxi.”
“She knew you,” Lila said.
“No,” Richard told her. “She knew my father and she called him by name, but she didn’t remember me.”
“You don’t understand,” Lila said. “The worst thing in the world for a mother is to leave her child. She couldn’t bring herself to remember you, because if she did she’d have to leave you behind.”
In the morning, when she woke up, the first thing Lila heard was a jet overhead. But when she listened carefully she could hear the rhythm of an ax. She got out of bed and reached for her robe. In the kitchen, the back door was ajar. A few hours earlier it had begun to rain; puddles had formed, and when Lila walked out to the patio the sudden rush of cold water on her feet left her confused for a moment. In the rear of the yard Richard was cutting down the vines that covered the fence. The ax he used had been stored in the garage for years, but it was still so sharp that in no time a huge pile of vines had collected on the ground. There were white flowers with green centers all over the yard, as if an earthquake had torn them from their vines.
At this time of year in East China, nothing grew. Lilies were deep in the frozen ground, peach trees and azaleas were bare. It had been the dead of winter when Lila and Richard left New York, but the sky had been deep blue. The cake tin Helen had given Lila was red metal, and because the cake inside was still warm, the tin seemed to shine. The one time Lila looked back, Helen was following their car. She went as far as the end of the dirt driveway, where in the spring there would be so much deep mud that Jason would have to shovel for hours before he could move his car. Helen stopped, and she stood there waving. Up on the porch, Jason Grey lit a cigarette, then leaned over the wooden railing. He stayed right where he was as they drove away, watching his wife and waiting for her to come back to him.
Out in the rain, Lila pulled her bathrobe tighter around herself. Somehow, she had become forty-six years old, and she di
dn’t know quite how it had happened. She wondered if there was something about California that made the time move so quickly. Without winter to shock you into another year, entire seasons had dissolved in the sunshine; and no one could manage time in a place where even the roses were so confused that they bloomed year round.
Richard was almost through clearing the fence. He worked harder than ever, as though his life depended on the steady rhythm of the ax. Later, Lila would make him a pot of hot coffee. She’d sit on the rim of the tub while he bathed, just to be near him. But for now, she waited. In their own backyard, as the rain washed all the snails out of their garden, Lila and Richard crossed over an invisible line together. Impossible as it seemed, they had become older than Helen and Jason Grey had been on that day in East China when ice was everywhere and the sky was so cold and so blue.
PART THREE
IN NOVEMBER, WHEN THE moon was clear and white and the acacia trees gave off a bitter scent, Rae began to believe that she had lost the baby. It wasn’t just that odd look on the psychic’s face as she read Rae’s tea leaves, it was that she felt so absolutely well. During the first three months she had been exhausted, and so queasy that she couldn’t stand to look at boiled eggs. Now she could stay up past eleven, she could eat hot chili if she wanted to, and she had so much energy that she found herself cleaning out closets on her days off from work. The better she felt, the more she sensed something was wrong, and there was one thing she knew for certain: in all these months she had not once felt the baby move.
She went through lists of birth defects and diseases, but in the end she decided that she herself was at fault. She had taken too many hot showers, eaten too much salt, she’d lifted her arms high above her head so that the umbilical cord had wrapped itself around the baby’s neck. In her heart she knew that each time she gained another pound it was only because her body had been cruelly tricked. Her pregnancy was a farce, it would never last full term; eventually someone would cut her open and remove whatever was inside her, and that would be the end of it. She put off going to see an obstetrician, and at work she refused to answer any of Freddy’s questions about her health. But Freddy had already guessed, and one day he took her out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant and offered her five hundred dollars.
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