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

by Alice Hoffman

  “You’re kidding,” Rae said. “You want to give me money?”

  “I was thinking of it as a loan,” Freddy said. “For one thing, Rae, you need new clothes.”

  “Are you going to fire me?” Rae said.

  She and Jessup had managed to save four thousand dollars—the bankbook was hidden in the silverware drawer, under the forks and spoons—and if she really had been having this baby she could have used the savings to cover the hospital bills if Freddy fired her.

  “Of course I’m not going to fire you,” Freddy said. “But I’ll tell you the truth—I’m real uncomfortable about this whole pregnancy thing.”

  “So am I,” Rae said.

  “You know what I’d like to know?” Freddy said. “Where’s that assassin now that you need him?”

  “I’m not interested in your money,” Rae said stiffly.

  “Oh, come on,” Freddy said. “I’d charge you less interest than a bank would.”

  Rae couldn’t help laughing.

  “Seriously,” Freddy said. “It’s a gift.”

  Rae knew that Freddy was feeling sorry for her, and somehow that made her feel sorry for herself. She put down her chopsticks and watched him write out the check, unable to stop him, unable to tell him the baby would never be born. If she and Jessup had only left California things might have been different. For a while they had talked about using their savings to go to Alaska. Actually, Jessup had been the one doing the talking.

  “This country feels too small for me,” he had told Rae one night.

  “Oh, really?” Rae was amused by the idea.

  “Yes, really,” Jessup had insisted. “Everything’s been overdone and overused in this country. There are no options any more.”

  “What about Alaska,” Rae had teased. “Is that too small for you, too?”

  The moment he looked over at her she thought, Oh, shit—he’s serious about this.

  “Admit it,” Jessup had said. “It’s not a bad idea—even if it is yours.”

  “Not Alaska,” Rae told him.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s just consider it—that’s all.”

  They had been in bed, and Rae wrapped her arms around him. “All right,” she’d agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we’ll really do it.”

  Now she wished they had. If it had been just the two of them somewhere in Alaska, they might still be together. Snow would reach the rooftop of their cabin, and at night the ice outside would turn everything blue—everything, the glaciers and the white wolves and the owls that lived in the eaves. A child born there would be so healthy it would reach out its arms to hold you the moment after its birth.

  “I think I have to go home,” Rae told Freddy.

  She took the rest of the day off, and when she got home she opened all the windows in the apartment. She had suddenly begun to miss Boston, and although she had always hated the winters there, she yearned for a real November, and clear, cold air. Once, on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving vacation, she had been sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, when Carolyn came downstairs, wearing her camel’s-hair coat and a black wool hat.

  “Listen,” Carolyn had said to Rae, “don’t go to school today.”

  Rae looked up from her coffee, but her mother didn’t explain any further. They still weren’t really talking to each other, except for those things that had to be said: Pass the butter, Pass the salt, The telephone’s for you. But Rae had a math test that day, and everyone suspected a surprise quiz in French class.

  “All right,” Rae agreed.

  They drove downtown, to the Museum of Fine Arts. In the parking lot Carolyn turned to Rae after she took the key out of the ignition.

  “I’ve been thinking about going back to school,” Carolyn said. “Maybe even law school.”

  Rae had heard this before. “Do it,” she advised.

  “I don’t know if I can,” Carolyn said.

  “Then why do you always talk about it?” Rae snapped.

  “You know what my problem is?” Carolyn said.

  It had begun to grow cold in the car; Rae shifted uncomfortably.

  “I was always afraid to be alone.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Rae said without interest.

  “Now I see you making the same exact mistake with Jessup as I did with your father,” Carolyn said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Rae said. “Could we just go to the museum?”

  She got out of the car and slammed the door behind her, then walked ten paces ahead of Carolyn to the door of the museum. All through the Grecian ruins Rae stayed far enough away from her mother to prevent any conversation between them.

  “I’m sorry,” Carolyn finally said.

  They were walking through a room filled with Japanese kimonos. “I don’t mean to insult you,” Carolyn said. “It’s just that I see you running after Jessup.”

  “I am not running after him,” Rae said.

  “Well, going after him, then,” Carolyn said. “And once he wrecks your life there’ll be nothing I can do about it. I’m warning you—don’t come running to me.”

  A young couple had come into the room, and now walked past them. Rae moved away from her mother. Carolyn followed her daughter to the next glass case of kimonos. The material had been painted by more than two dozen women; willows and water lilies washed over gold-and rose-colored silk.

  “The one time I didn’t feel alone was when I was pregnant,” Carolyn said. “After you were born I couldn’t imagine how I had managed to live all those years without you. How did I survive before? Who did I love?”

  In the gift shop, before they were about to leave, Carolyn had insisted on buying Rae a gift, a poster of Monet’s water lilies, which somehow seemed crude after the delicate kimonos. “Perfect for your room,” Carolyn had whispered as they waited for the cashier to wrap the poster in brown paper.

  Rae had agreed, she had even politely thanked her mother, but she knew that before long she and Jessup would be leaving, and the Monet poster would hang in her empty bedroom.

  When they left the museum it was four, and very nearly dark. Rae carried the rolled-up poster under her arm and kept her hands in her pockets. If she had gone to school that day she would have already been home for a half an hour, waiting for Jessup to appear on the sidewalk.

  “I don’t know why it is, but November smells like smoke,” Carolyn said. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I think it’s delicious.”

  When Rae breathed in she realized that her mother was right, the air was delicious. For some reason Rae had the sudden urge to put her arm through her mother’s arm, to feel the weight of the camel’s-hair coat that Carolyn stored in a cedar closet every summer. But by then they had reached the car and Carolyn was humming as she reached into her coat pocket for the keys. Rae felt something in her chest, and she forced herself to take several deep breaths. As Carolyn unlocked the car, Rae wondered why it was that she should have to feel sorry for her mother, and why, as she breathed in the smoky blue air, one visit to the Museum of Fine Arts could make her feel so lost.

  In Massachusetts, Rae could look out her window and see chestnut trees, white stars, clouds that covered the moon. Here, from her kitchen, she saw only the empty street. But the dogs were out there, she knew it. Ever since the heat wave they had been wandering through the neighborhood, looking for water and bones. And sure enough, when Rae pressed her face up against the glass she saw a large black Labrador in the courtyard; she quickly pulled down the shade. Late that night, at ten minutes after twelve, she telephoned Lila Grey.

  “Are you crazy?” Lila said after Richard had handed her the phone. “How dare you call me at this hour. I’ll tell you something right now—I don’t intend to read for you ever again. Got that?”

  Richard sat up in bed, concerned.

  “It’s nothing,” Lila told him. “Go back to sleep.”

  “This is the thing,” Rae said slowly, as though she hadn’t heard a word Lila had said to her, “I think there’s so
mething wrong with my baby.”

  Lila leaned up against the headboard; she could feel her mouth grow dry.

  “Don’t ask me why, because I can’t tell you,” Rae said. “I just know something’s wrong.”

  “Do you want my advice?” Lila asked. She was shaking, and she wished Richard would turn on his side and stop watching her. That motionless child in Rae’s teacup refused to disappear. “Go see a doctor,” she told Rae.

  “I can’t do that,” Rae said quickly.

  “Tomorrow, as soon as you get up, call an obstetrician and make an appointment,” Lila said.

  Rae didn’t answer; she lifted the windowshade and watched the black dog stretch out in the courtyard for the night.

  “Are you going to listen to me?” Lila said. She could hear the edge of panic in her voice, and she took Richard’s hand to reassure him; under the sheets their fingers intertwined.

  “Yes,” Rae said.

  “And I don’t want you to call me again,” Lila said.

  “You hate me,” Rae said. “Don’t you?”

  It was really much too late to be talking to strangers, it was the time of night when mothers went to their children who had nightmares, and they held their sons and daughters close, and stroked their hair until they fell asleep.

  “Call a doctor,” Lila said gently.

  “All right,” Rae agreed.

  “Good girl,” Lila said.

  After she’d hung up, Rae couldn’t sleep, and in the morning, when she called for an appointment at a clinic nearby, her voice was so hoarse she had to struggle to whisper. They made room on the schedule that afternoon. In the waiting room, Rae tried to imagine that Jessup was beside her, but she knew he would have never come here with her. She considered leaving, but before she could the nurse called her name and took her into a small office for blood tests. Rae didn’t panic until she walked into the examining room. The doctor was a woman who seemed much too young—and really, Rae knew, this visit was pointless.

  “I don’t think this is the best time for me to be examined,” Rae said.

  “You’re right,” the doctor said. “The best time would have been two months ago.”

  Rae took off her clothes, put on a paper smock, and lay down on the examining table. She closed her eyes during the internal, and when she was told that everything looked fine, she was sure this doctor was a fool.

  Rae answered all the questions for a medical history, but as she did she could feel herself growing colder. If she really thought about it, it was better this way. She wasn’t meant to have a baby alone, it was fate; and if there was a good time to lose a baby it was now, before she began to feel it move inside her, before she started to wait for the rhythm of its turning in its sleep.

  “Is something wrong?” the doctor asked her. “You just don’t seem interested.” She had been going over a food chart and discussing the vitamins she was about to prescribe.

  “How long have you been a doctor?” Rae asked.

  “Four years—is that long enough for you?”

  Rae felt herself grow embarrassed. “Oh, it’s enough, all right,” she said. “It’s just that you missed something. My baby is dead.”

  “I see,” the doctor said. “You’re positive?”

  Rae was so cold that she was certain her blood had begun to freeze. When she looked closely at herself she noticed that the skin on her arms and legs was faintly purple.

  “Don’t you think I know?” Rae said. “Don’t you think I can tell?”

  “Lie down,” the doctor said.

  Rae knew now—this was the moment when she would be cut open: the doctor would reach her hands deep inside and lift the baby out, then hide it as she sewed Rae back together.

  “You’d better not touch me,” Rae said.

  She could not believe her voice. Her real voice didn’t sound that way. The doctor rolled over a tall, metal machine, and when she moved closer to the examining table, Rae sat up straight.

  “Don’t come near me,” she said.

  It was her voice after all. God, she was practically squeaking. It wasn’t so much being cut open that terrified her, it was the fact that it was now. Now the operation would begin. Now she would lose her baby.

  “I don’t know what you think I’m going to do to you,” the doctor said. “But all I’m going to do is listen to your baby’s heartbeat.”

  Rae nearly laughed out loud; this was supposed to comfort her? A wild search for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.

  “Okay?” the doctor said.

  Rae looked at her coldly, then shrugged. She lay back down on the table and closed her eyes.

  “This amplifies sound,” the doctor explained as she rubbed some gel on Rae’s abdomen.

  With her eyes closed, Rae could feel the ice in the room, and it made her think of the time she and Jessup had taken a bus to Rockport one winter. The harbor had been frozen solid, but as they stood by the docks they could see the tide moving beneath the ice, and when they knelt down and peered beneath the dock they could see that the ice itself was shifting.

  “That’s the placenta you hear,” the doctor said.

  “If I lived in this town I’d go crazy,” Jessup had said. “Imagine trying to sleep with the sound of the goddamn ocean ringing in your ears.”

  “I’d love it,” Rae had said. It was one of the few times she had disagreed with him. She didn’t look over at him, but could tell he was studying her.

  “Yeah, well, maybe you get used to it if you hear it every night,” he had finally allowed her.

  “I think I’ve found it,” the doctor said.

  Rae opened her eyes. She leaned up, resting on her elbows.

  “I don’t hear it,” she said.

  “Just listen,” the doctor told her.

  That was when she heard it, and at the moment she heard it she started to cry.

  “That’s it,” the doctor said. “That’s your baby.”

  Rae was hit by something as immediate as lightning, but more piercing, whiter, a thousand times more perfect. The heartbeat seemed to come from a very great distance away. She had to remind herself that it was inside her. If she’d ever said she didn’t care about this baby she’d been a liar. When the amplifier was turned off and she could no longer hear it, she sat on the edge of the examining table and wept. Later, she apologized to the doctor and got dressed. She filled out her medical forms and drove back to her apartment, but if anything it was all more of a mystery than it had been before: how anything as fragile as a body might suddenly be so strong it could carry two hearts, and not even feel the weight.

  In less than a month, Rae found that she could come home from work, spend the entire evening in Jessup’s easy chair reading Dr. Spock, and actually enjoy it. There was a whole new language to learn: colic and cradle cap and expressed milk. She began to wake every night at three a.m., as though she were in training. She bought milk by the quart and drank herbal tea. When none of her clothes buttoned any more, she decided against a secondhand store. Instead, she took two hundred dollars out of the bank account, went to the maternity department at Bullock’s, and then spent more money on clothes in forty-five minutes than she had in the last five years. By the time the saleswoman had handed her two shopping bags, Rae was so out of breath that she had to go out to the parked Oldsmobile and lean her head against the steering wheel. There, in the parking lot, Rae felt something move for the first time. It wasn’t at all what she had expected, and she picked her head up from the steering wheel and waited for it to come again. She’d been expecting an actual kick, but what she felt was more like fluttering, as if a pair of wings were deep inside her. When it happened a second time Rae realized that she had been feeling the exact same thing for weeks.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said to herself in the Oldsmobile. This was really it: her child was moving.

  She decided on natural childbirth and discussed it with her doctor. But when the subject of a labor coach came up, Rae found herself lying—her hus
band, she said, was currently on the road, selling truck tires. It was a career so unlike the ones Jessup dreamed of that for a moment she almost felt as though she had gotten back at him. She imagined him in a VW van, with a load of oversized tires, and she left him stranded on the interstate in Nebraska with a blowout and no tire small enough to fit his van.

  The first person she asked to be her coach was Freddy, and he told her it was out of the question. For days afterward he was afraid to talk to her. Finally, he offered her money to hire a labor coach, and he couldn’t understand why she refused him.

  “It would be totally different to have you as my coach,” Rae told him. “I wouldn’t be paying you—you’d be there because you wanted to be.”

  “Oh, no I wouldn’t,” Freddy said. “Believe me. I wouldn’t want to be there. Rae, I don’t even want to hear about somebody’s birth. I don’t want to see a photograph. Is that the kind of coach you want?”

  She nearly asked the woman next door, an actress she sometimes arranged to do her laundry with so they wouldn’t both have to sit in the laundromat alone after dark. But when Rae met her out by the mailboxes one evening and mentioned natural childbirth, her neighbor looked stricken. She couldn’t even step inside a hospital, she told Rae—if she were ever to have a child, they’d have to knock her out at the door.

  And so it wasn’t as if Rae wanted to ask Lila Grey—she simply didn’t have anyone else.

  “It’s pathetic, isn’t it?” Rae said, after she’d phoned Lila and explained what she wanted. “That I have to ask you.”

  What was infinitely worse, Lila thought, was to be stupid enough to get trapped on the stairwell, and to have your water break right there, in a place that was so dim it was difficult to find your way on an ordinary day. No one had been there to help her on that stairway—but there were times when Lila liked to think that Hannie grabbed at her own side at the very same moment she did, searching each rib for the pain.