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

by Alice Hoffman

  Just as she was about to leave, Jessup walked over and tapped on the window. After Rae rolled it down, he surprised them both by taking her hand. For a moment Rae swore she could see the stream of light just beneath his skin, but she forced herself to look away.

  When Rae put the car in gear Jessup let go of her hand. But before she drove back onto the dirt driveway Rae turned to him and smiled.

  “You’re going to miss me,” she said, and she didn’t even give him a chance to disagree.

  In Barstow, Rae stopped at a diner and got herself a sandwich to go, which she ate as she drove over the mountains. There was a thin cover of snow on the ground, and even though the altitude was higher, it was already easier to breathe. By the time she reached the flatlands it was possible to pick up L.A. radio stations. The air grew warm enough to turn the car heater off. She wasn’t thinking about Jessup, she was thinking about those horses, and the more she thought about them the more relieved she was that she didn’t have to spend another moment watching them move along the wooden fence. The whole time she had been with Jessup she had been seeing those horses. Even when she wasn’t looking she could still see them out of the corner of her eye, like a shadow that kept getting in the way of her line of vision.

  She got home in the middle of the afternoon. After she’d parked the Oldsmobile and gotten out she noticed a Volkswagen parked in front of the entrance to the apartment complex. As she walked by she could tell that the man in the driver’s seat was watching her, and halfway across the courtyard she knew that he was following her. Rae walked faster and kept her keys between her fingers, sharp edge out. When she heard him clear his throat she started to run. For the first time in weeks she wished desperately that Jessup were in the apartment and that all she had to do was shout his name and he’d open the front door.

  “Are you Rae?” she heard the man behind her call.

  She kept running.

  “Rae?” he called.

  She turned and faced him. He was standing in the middle of the courtyard watching her.

  “What if I am?” Rae said. She was less than fifty feet from her own door, and if she ran she could make it there before he had the chance to move.

  “I’m Richard Grey,” he told her. “Lila’s husband.”

  Now that he was here he felt slightly ridiculous. He’d found her address in Lila’s phone book, but it was really none of his business.

  Rae looked over her shoulder, at her front door. Being afraid had started her wishing for Jessup, and now she found she couldn’t stop. It was almost as if the man she wanted was someone other than the one she had just left in the desert. The Jessup she wanted was waiting for her at home. Together they felt so safe they could keep the door unlocked at all hours of the day and night and not feel as if they were in any danger.

  “Is something wrong?” Rae managed to ask.

  “Lila’s gone,” Richard told her.

  “What do you mean—gone?” Rae said.

  “She went to New York,” Richard said. “I knew you were counting on her to be your labor coach, so I thought I’d better tell you. I’ve been trying you on the phone, but no one’s ever home.”

  “Wait a second,” Rae said. “She promised me.”

  “Well, she’s back in New York,” Richard said. In the empty courtyard his voice sounded hollow. “That’s where we come from,” he added, as though it explained something.

  Rae felt her face get hot. “You can’t depend on anybody,” she said.

  “So what do you think?” Richard said to her now. “Do you think she’s coming back?”

  Rae looked at him carefully and realized that he was crying. She looked away, embarrassed, but she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be loved that much.

  “Sure,” Rae said. “She’ll come back.”

  She was certain that after she’d left this morning Jessup had gone on with his plans for the day. He wouldn’t start to miss her till later, and then he’d borrow Hal’s car and drive to Barstow. He’d look up that waitress or somebody new, and the whole time he was missing her, he’d be holding somebody else.

  Richard had collected himself, and he was particularly grateful that Rae hadn’t looked at him while he’d been crying.

  “I guess I’ll go home,” he said.

  “That’s a good idea,” Rae agreed. “Maybe she’ll call you.”

  They looked at each other then and laughed.

  “It’s hell waiting for a phone call,” Rae said.

  “How about a drink?” Richard said suddenly, and then he seemed flustered. “I didn’t mean alcohol,” he explained. “I was thinking about something cold.”

  Actually, Rae knew that what he wanted wasn’t a drink. It was just some company.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Richard followed her across the courtyard, then waited while she unlocked the door and went to turn on the lights. His pain was so evident that Rae almost forgot her own as she led him into the kitchen and poured them both glasses of cold, blue milk. It made it a little easier to come home when someone was sitting across the table, and because neither of them wanted to leave, they drank two glasses of milk apiece, and after a while Rae had to admit she could use a little company, too.

  PART FOUR

  IT WAS SNOWING WHEN LILA first got to New York, and that made her arrival easier. Everything was white, and when she took the limousine from Kennedy Airport into Manhattan she could have been anywhere: in the middle of a frozen city in Europe, deep in the iciest part of Canada. She was dropped off at the Hilton, and it felt so anonymous there that she stayed. She ordered room service and had her dinner at a table by the window on the twenty-third floor. Below her was a grid of lights. Each time a building dared to seem familiar it was swallowed up by snow; this high up above the city it almost seemed as if Lila was farther away from New York now than she had been for the past twenty-seven years.

  At midnight Lila got into bed, but every time she closed her eyes she thought she heard something, and at a little after two she got up and turned off the steam heat. In the morning it was so cold that ice formed inside windowpanes all over the city. Lila ordered breakfast from room service, and then, when the waiter had left her alone and her coffee had been poured, she took out the Manhattan Telephone Directory. Her parents were no longer listed, and when she dialed the old number, which she was surprised to find she still knew by heart, a stranger answered and insisted she’d had the number for more than fifteen years.

  She would get the information out of them no matter what. She didn’t care how old they’d become: she would shake her mother by her shoulders until her fragile bones snapped, she would stare her father down no matter how sightless his eyes had become. She got dressed and went down to the lobby at a little after ten. Her wool coat was much too thin for a New York winter, and even after she had gotten into a cab she was still freezing. She gave the driver her old address and sat on the edge of the back seat. The city seemed much more complicated, and there was so much more of everything: traffic, and lights, and fear. When they got there Lila made the driver circle the block four times before she admitted that her building was gone. The old brownstones had been knocked down and a new co-op had taken their place, and it was the oddest feeling to be back on her old street without really being there at all. She had the driver circle the block one last time while she tried to decide what to do. She could feel herself begin to panic. All she could think of were the smallest details from her past: the numbers of the buses that used to run crosstown, the varieties of flowers their neighbors used to keep in a window box, how many cracks in the sidewalk had to be stepped over and avoided when she walked from the front stoop to the candy store.

  “This is costing you money,” the driver reminded her. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “The building’s gone,” Lila said. Her voice sounded higher than it should, as if she were still eighteen and so shy she could barely bring herself to ask customers in the restaurant what
they’d like for lunch.

  “Yeah, well, that happens,” the driver assured her. “How about trying another address?”

  They drove to Third Avenue, but when they reached the corner Lila told the driver not to stop. As they passed by the spot where the restaurant used to be, Lila rolled down her window. Hannie always walked west when she left the restaurant in the evenings; if Lila worked late she could sometimes look out and see Hannie looking through the wooden boxes of vegetables in the market down the block, choosing the right head of cabbage or pointing to three perfect apples with a bony finger before she reached for the change purse she kept pinned to the inside pocket of her black skirt.

  All the time Lila had been away she had imagined New York to be exactly as she had left it. Pigeons still sat on the ledge outside her bedroom window, her mother made pot roast every Friday night in the cast-iron roasting pan she had inherited from Lila’s grandmother. At night the sky was inky, apartments were always overheated and hallways much too cold, and on Third Avenue, at the rear table, you could find out everything you had ever wanted to know for fifty cents. It was almost as if Lila had truly believed that she could be eighteen again, and that one ticket on a jet from Los Angeles to New York could buy back all the things she had lost. There was only one more address that might be worth something—her aunt and uncle’s apartment on 86th Street. They were her cousin Ann’s parents, and by now they’d be quite elderly. Lila had spent holidays at their apartment. The adults had always sat in the living room, drinking wine and eating small apple cakes. The children had been relegated to the bedroom, where they could make as much noise as they liked.

  Ann, older than the rest of the cousins, would lock herself away in the second, smaller bedroom. They could hear her radio through the bedroom wall, always the same thing, Frank Sinatra, and the cousins made fun of her behind her back and called her Frankie’s girl. Once, when the cousins were being particularly obnoxious, opening the windows and tossing crumpled newspapers onto anyone who happened to walk by, Lila had gone out into the hallway, pushed open her cousin’s bedroom door a bit, and looked in. The radio was on and Ann was lying on her bed, writing in her diary. When she saw Lila at the door she rushed over and slammed it shut, so hard that it made Lila jump. Lila was twelve years old, and because she felt that nobody wanted her, she stayed right there in the hallway. Then and there she decided that she would never come to another family get-together again, and when her parents were ready to go and called out her name, they were surprised to find her waiting by the door, already wearing her coat and her hat.

  She had never gone back to that apartment again, although when the driver now pulled up it seemed as if she had been there only days ago. She went in through the first set of doors. It was dark in the foyer, just as it had been the last time she’d been there, when her hair was so long it fell to her waist, even after it had been braided. Her parents had been arguing, so Lila was the one to ring upstairs, and she’d stood on tiptoes to reach the buzzer.

  All morning Lila could feel the chances of finding her daughter slip away; and there were times, when the taxi was stalled in traffic, when she could not quite remember why she had come back in the first place. Here in the foyer, the black-and-white tiles echoed when you walked across them. The glass shade that covered the overhead light made things seem fuzzy and shapeless, and Lila had to look twice before she allowed herself to believe that the name Weber—her mother’s maiden name—was still on the tenants’ directory. She had found someone.

  She rang upstairs; there was the sound of static as someone on the sixth floor picked up the intercom.

  “Yes?” a woman said.

  “It’s me,” Lila said, right away, as though she’d been expected. “Lila.”

  There was static over the intercom, and then suddenly, the buzzer rang. Lila grabbed the door open and ran all the way to the elevator. She went down the long hallway on the sixth floor, and then knocked on the door, once. She could feel her heart racing, and when someone came to open the door Lila could feel the click of the lock inside her own body, like a bone breaking.

  There was a chain inside the door, and a woman looked out, examining Lila. For a moment Lila recognized her aunt; she was just as she had been when Lila was twelve years old.

  “It is you,” the woman said.

  It was Lila’s cousin, not her aunt, and for the first time since she’d come to New York Lila felt that same sense of expectation she had had when she had begged Richard to drive into Manhattan one last time. She could actually feel herself getting closer to the past when she walked into the apartment, and if her teenaged cousin had run past them, to lock herself in her bedroom and listen to records, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

  “I guess I must look old to you,” Ann said. “You get this way living in Manhattan, but when my parents moved to Florida I couldn’t pass up a rent-controlled apartment, so I moved back here.”

  Lila tried to listen to her cousin, but she couldn’t. Again and again she reminded herself that she didn’t have to scream—all she had to do was ask; she simply wanted a name or an address. She wanted her daughter.

  “I was married and divorced and I took back my own name,” Ann was saying. “If I were still living in Connecticut you would have never found me. His last name was Starch, which should have warned me right from the start.”

  Lila wanted to interrupt, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

  “It’s just my mother now,” Ann said. “My father died two years ago.” She looked at Lila carefully. “Do you want to know about your parents?” she asked.

  “No,” Lila said.

  The force of that word felt like a piece of glass under her tongue, and when Ann asked if she wanted a drink of water or juice, Lila nodded. While Ann was in the kitchen Lila realized that she was sitting where her mother always sat when they came for a visit. On holidays her mother never had more than two glasses of wine, but that small amount did something to her, and on the way home from this apartment she always told Lila family secrets: how her brother had been in love with another woman but had settled for his wife, how her father had been such a big drinker they used to hide the wine in a boot kept in the front closet.

  “Are they alive?” Lila asked when Ann came back with tall glasses of orange juice.

  Ann shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  There was a plate of cookies on the table, and that reminded Lila that her mother had packed her a lunch to take along on the train out to East China. She had been unwrapping the cheese sandwich that her mother had made in those last moments before they took her to Penn Station when the train reached the outskirts of East China. She put her sandwich down and moved closer to the window and saw the spot where the potato fields begin, where the earth is so sandy you can feel it whenever you rub your fingers together, and at night the sand gets in between the sheets on everyone’s bed, and each time you kiss someone you can feel sand on the edge of your tongue.

  “Cancer,” Ann said. “Both of them.”

  They sat on couches facing each other, a coffee table between them.

  “I know why you’re here,” Ann said. “It was all my fault. When they asked me about adoption I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “I want her back,” Lila said.

  It was such a simple thing to say that it was hard to believe it could hurt so much to say it.

  “Sometimes I wish I had taken her for myself,” Ann said.

  “I’ve wanted her back from the minute you took her,” Lila said.

  “I thought about keeping her when I had her with me in the cab,” Ann said. “She was wrapped in one towel, and it just seemed so cold that night.”

  That night when she had walked out to the living room both of Lila’s parents had turned away, terrified to look at the baby. Out on the street, she couldn’t get a cab, so she kept the baby warm inside her coat and walked to Eighth Avenue. The baby was crying and Ann could feel her shivering.
The ice storm had stopped everything: no buses were running and telephone lines were out. Stores that were usually open twenty-four hours a day were shut down behind iron bars, trucks were abandoned on the roads, pigeons froze in midair, and their shattered bodies lined the sidewalks.

  Some people who were stranded had managed to get cabs, which were driven by only the bravest drivers. They skidded and careened down the avenues, and each time one passed Ann hailed it, but no one would stop for her. She had called Dr. Marshall from Lila’s parents’ apartment and arranged to meet him in his office at the hospital as soon as the baby was born. Now, she wasn’t sure if he’d still be there or if he’d gone home once the ice storm had begun. But where else was there to go? Although her feet were numb and a coating of ice formed around her ankles, she continued walking downtown. After a while the baby stopped crying, and that was what really scared Ann—as long as it had been making noise she knew it was alive. She shook it, but there was no response, and she could tell it was the silence of someone who has nothing more to lose. She had to get to the hospital immediately, and the next time a taxi passed Ann ran out into the street and stood right in front of it. The taxi skidded to a halt when it couldn’t avoid her, and as soon as it had stopped, Ann ran to the passenger door and got inside.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the cabbie said. “You can’t just jump in front of a cab and get in.”