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

by Alice Hoffman

  She turned and went into the kitchen, but once the door had closed behind her, she didn’t know what she was doing there. She didn’t notice that it was too warm to still be wearing her wool coat and her boots. She had a confused, weightless feeling, as if she had stumbled not only into the wrong house but into the wrong time. When she had imagined coming home she had imagined feeling guilty, not betrayed. And she nearly forgot that even though she had not found Richard alone, she also was not alone. She had brought her daughter home with her.

  By the time Richard followed her into the kitchen, Lila had decided to act as if nothing was wrong. She filled the tea kettle and put it up to boil. But every casual movement was difficult. The atmosphere was pushing down on her, the way it does in a jet, just after takeoff when the pressurized air suddenly turns fierce.

  “Is this it?” Richard said to her. “After all this time you just walk right past me without a single explanation?”

  Lila took a lemon from the window sill and cut it into quarters. She looked down and saw that her hand was shaking, and she quickly dropped the knife into the sink.

  “Why didn’t you talk to me when I called?” Richard asked. “Why did my father act like everything was a goddamned secret?”

  They could hear Rae straighten up in the living room, picking up pillows from the floor, putting on her shoes, rewinding the relaxation tape on the recorder. In the kitchen, the sound of the rewinding tape was exactly like the sound of someone drowning.

  “I should have guessed you’d get involved with her,” Lila said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Richard said. “You left and she was stuck without a labor coach.”

  “Are you sleeping with her?” Lila asked.

  “Are you crazy?” Richard said.

  “I don’t know,” Lila said. “Is it crazy to want your husband to remain faithful?”

  “How are you doing this?” Richard said. “How can you manage to make it seem like I’m the one who’s done something wrong?”

  Miles above the earth, somewhere above Michigan, Lila had been struck with the sudden knowledge that she was about to lose someone. If she had to choose, Lila knew who that someone would be. The cabin of the jet had been flooded with light; to look at the clouds or the earth below, you had to wear sunglasses and squint. It was like the instant after you flip a coin, and your heart rate lets you know what you really wanted all along.

  “Are you going to tell me why you left?” Richard said.

  The tea kettle had begun to whistle, and Lila got a cup and saucer from the drying rack. If she had brought back a young woman she could have introduced her as her daughter, she could have explained. A long time ago, she would have told Richard, on a night that was so cold you couldn’t light a match without having the flame freeze, she had given in to something so powerful it was impossible to fight it. She could hold on to the mattress until her fingers turned white, she could scream until her throat was raw, but all the time she did she knew she was just about to surrender. The surrender was unconditional, it lasted forever. But it didn’t really matter that she had no proof, no flesh-and-blood child, no one to introduce to him. She was someone’s mother, and there was no way to explain that her daughter was a ghost.

  “Just tell me what’s going on,” Richard said. “Is that asking too much?”

  Lila opened the cabinet above the stove. She took one look and could feel their marriage dissolving. When she thought now of their wedding day, she couldn’t even remember what kind of flowers had grown outside by the kitchen door. There were no longer any teabags in this cabinet; he had rearranged things without once guessing that putting down new shelf paper and moving a few boxes and bowls would make her believe that it was over between them.

  “What did you do?” Lila said.

  Richard reached for the cabinet nearest the refrigerator and pulled it open. A box of teabags was now stored next to canned vegetables, soup, salt shakers, silverware.

  “It’s a lot more convenient this way,” Richard began to explain.

  “How could you do this to me?” Lila said. “How could you go ahead and do this?”

  Richard looked at her carefully. He ran one hand through his hair. “This is crazy,” he said. “This is true insanity.”

  It wasn’t just the whistle of the kettle that caused the high pitch in the room. It was the tension between them; they couldn’t take their eyes off each other, and both of them knew that if they weren’t careful someone was about to go too far.

  Out in the living room, Rae knew that she had to get out of there, but she didn’t know quite how to do it. She had been waiting for someone to come out of the kitchen and dismiss her, preferably Richard. But now she could tell, from the sound of their voices, they had forgotten her. So she did what she thought was only polite. She went to the kitchen door and gently knocked.

  “I think I’m going to go now,” she called in to them.

  “Oh, God,” Lila groaned. She could feel Rae draining her energy, just as she had the first time they met. “Will you get her out of here?” she said to Richard.

  “She has nothing to do with this,” Richard said.

  But through the closed door Lila could feel Rae’s weight, and the slow movements of her baby as it turned in its sleep. Worst of all she could feel Rae’s happiness, and it was that sense of expectation that burned right through Lila, like a jolt of electricity. Without thinking twice, Lila turned to the open cabinet and threw everything on the floor. Salt and silver trinkets saved in a box with a dog’s tooth they had found in the garden, three silver knives, a fistful of black tea torn from two teabags, a wishbone, dust. And as Richard watched, horrified by the mess, Lila bent down and mixed it all together, and as she did she secretly wished Rae a labor exactly like her own. Right there in her own kitchen Lila called up pain, fear, suffering, blood, loneliness, and deceit.

  Richard backed her into a corner and said her name three times. But she still wouldn’t listen to him.

  “Get her out!” Lila said.

  Richard swallowed hard, then he went out to the hallway and helped Rae find her coat in the closet. Lila could hear their voices. Richard was apologizing, she could tell from his tone. He walked Rae to the door, and then Lila heard his footsteps returning. She was pacing the floor when he came back; her nerve endings were so raw that the air against her skin hurt.

  “She’s gone,” Richard said. “We can talk now.”

  Lila looked at him from the corner of her eye and laughed.

  “Please,” Richard said. “Just talk to me.”

  He was begging her, really. But Lila forced herself not to look at him. She couldn’t be distracted, not by him or anyone else. When she concentrated she could force her energy out through her fingertips in a flow of heat. She could bring back the ghost of the child who had died in East China.

  It was dangerous business. It was walking on the thinnest sort of ice where one false move can make you stumble. And once your foot broke through the ice it was only seconds before you fell through to that place where lost children call to their mothers but can never be found, and even their voices disappear after a while, each cry swallowed whole by the dark. Lila refused to let anything she felt for Richard get in her way, and so she held her breath and she slowly and purposely stepped right over the line of forgiveness.

  “Don’t you understand anything?” she said to him. “I don’t care enough about you to talk.”

  Richard instantly drew back. Lila had known that he would, but she hadn’t expected it to hurt so much. Hannie had had that same wounded look the first time Lila refused to speak to her. Lila had brought over her order of hot water and raisin buns, but when the old woman invited her to join her at the table, Lila pretended not to hear. She had walked away instead, and she hid in the kitchen, near the crates where they stored lettuce. But every time the swinging doors to the kitchen opened, Lila could see out to the rear table and, as she watched, the look on Hannie’s face turned to desp
air—it was a look that assured you the other person knew it was over between you.

  Out in the backyard three jays circled the bird feeder before they perched on its farthest edge. Richard stood absolutely still, just as he had on that day she first met him, when the tar bubbled up on the road and sea gulls dared to eat from the palm of her hand. When he left her, Lila tried to hear only one thing—the thin wail of the kettle. But when the front door slammed the sound echoed. And as she stood there, alone in the kitchen, she could not believe what she had done.

  She ran after him, but Richard had already gotten into his car and put it into gear. Lila pushed open the screen door and said his name, but he couldn’t hear her now, and she knew it. It was the time of day when the horizon above the city turns violet, the time of year when the air itself is blue and unpredictable. It was easy to forget how deceiving February could be in California—it pretended to be one season just long enough to fool you, then turned itself inside out and delivered what you least expected—a heat wave or a storm. Tonight it felt exactly like summer. There was that lemon-colored light you usually saw in August, and the scent of dried grass and eucalyptus. But for the first time that Lila could remember there wasn’t a single rose on the bushes outside the door, and when she looked carefully she could see a milky substance on the leaves, a sure sign of aphids and neglect.

  After a while, Lila went inside. She pulled the screen closed and locked the door. Then she carried her suitcase into the bedroom and began to unpack. She had a headache, a bad one. Bad enough so that when she closed her eyes she swore she could see Richard. His car was idling in the parking lot behind the liquor store on La Brea and the radio was turned on. Everyone who walked past could hear it, and it made them self-conscious about going into a liquor store alone. They all wound up buying more to drink than they’d intended, and they thought it was the Ray Charles song on the radio that made them feel like getting really drunk. But it wasn’t. It was seeing somebody who looked desperate parked out there in the lot on such a beautiful night that could really get to you, if you let it. Even if the big decision Richard was working on at that moment was a choice between bourbon and scotch.

  Lila took two aspirins from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom before she came back and took off her coat and boots. A jet passed by overhead, and out in someone’s yard a dog began to howl. When Lila had unpacked she went to her bureau and picked up the three silver bracelets she had left there. She put them on and they hit against each other, like pieces of ice in a glass. She thought, then, of her father-in-law. It was late in New York, and he was certainly already asleep in the parlor. Richard had told her that on the afternoon of Helen’s funeral, Jason Grey had locked himself in a closet and cried. Afterward, they’d had dinner together, a casserole sent over by the wife of the fellow who’d bought Jason’s gas station a few years back. Richard had continually looked over at his father, waiting for him to break down again. But he hadn’t—he ate some of what was on his plate, had coffee, and went to lie down on the couch in the parlor at a little after eight. Richard slept in his old bedroom. Near midnight he heard something out in back of the house and woke up. He went to the window and saw that his father was out there, digging a hole in the ground with a shovel. The first thing he’d thought, he’d told Lila later, was that his father was digging his own grave. That night the moon was orange and full and Richard had been certain that the reason his father had not appeared to be grieving during dinner was that he’d been planning to bury himself alive.

  Richard had stood at the window, unable to move. Outside, Jason Grey stopped digging; he leaned on his shovel and looked up at the sky. That was when Richard could see that the hole his father had been digging was much too small for a grave, even for something the size of a small dog. Jason took something out of his pocket. Richard pressed his face against the window and he could see that his father held a palm full of jewelry. It was Helen Grey’s jewelry—her wedding ring, a small aquamarine brooch, a strand of seed pearls, a silver locket in the shape of a heart. Jason Grey knelt down and carefully buried the jewelry in the ground. But then he didn’t go away—he just stood there, and he was standing there long after Richard had turned and gone back to bed.

  When he’d come home to Los Angeles a few days later, Richard told Lila that at the moment when his father knelt on the damp ground, he’d had the sense that something was about to begin. It wasn’t until the following morning that he realized what he’d felt was the start of his father’s grief, the beginning of something that would take years to complete.

  Lila sat on the edge of the bed and took off her silver bracelets. She felt terribly moved by the thought of her father-in-law out in his backyard, in the dark, opening his hands and trying to let his wife go. But, the truth was, it wasn’t the same. Outside, the dog who had been chained up tugged on his lead and whined. The sky was dark now, you couldn’t even see the birds who were nesting in the lemon tree for the night. There was simply no loss that compared to the death of a child. It was the one death that contained a thousand more within itself. An unbreakable ring, the end of everything your child might have been, the girl of ten, the woman of twenty, the one loss you just cannot bring yourself to believe.

  If Lila had been there, if she’d felt her daughter grow cold, if she’d been the one forced to search all over East China for a coffin small enough, she might have accepted it by now. She might have been able to take her father-in-law’s advice to let the dead go, even though afterward there would have been marks on her palms from the wrenching of letting go, small pinpoints that let in air and never seemed to heal. But instead of mourning what had been lost, Lila reached into her suitcase and took out her daughter’s sweater. She held it in her hands and she closed her eyes until she couldn’t see anything but white light. And as she sat there on the edge of the bed she could feel the material in her hands begin to grow warmer—so she closed her eyes tighter and willed her daughter to come to her.

  Richard came home after eleven. He’d had more to drink than he could ever remember. He parked his car in the driveway and carefully maneuvered his way up the dark path. There wasn’t a sound in the street, just his unsteady footsteps on the cement. When he got to the front door he just couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He sat down on the porch steps, between the two rose bushes, and tried to figure out what had gone wrong.

  Lila knew that he was back. She realized that all she had to do was make one move and all the others would follow. Just get out of bed, then put on her robe, then walk down the hallway and unlatch the front door. But she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t let her thoughts be swayed for a second. Her thoughts had to be as pure as light. And so she didn’t move when she heard him push the latch up on the screen door, then unlock the front door.

  He stood outside the closed bedroom door for a while, and then he went to the linen closet in the hallway and got some sheets. He undressed in the living room, in the dark. Just before he was about to lie down on the couch Richard realized that he smelled something burning. He followed the smell into the kitchen, where it turned overpoweringly bitter. The kitchen was dark, except for a circle of blue light that seemed somehow dangerous. For a split second, Richard found that he was afraid. But then he switched on the overhead light and saw that the blue circle was only the gas burner on the stove, turned on and forgotten. The water in the kettle had boiled away and the tin bottom was charred and smoking. Richard turned off the gas and put the kettle in the sink. He turned on the cold water and there was a rush of steam as the hot metal sizzled. When the kettle had cooled down, Richard tossed it in the trash, but even after he had opened the window the burning scent was still there, clinging to the curtains and the walls.

  Richard didn’t bother to put the sheets on the couch. He lay there, unable to sleep, imagining the way Lila used to look. The first time he saw her he knew there could never be anyone else, and the first time he had made love to her, he had actually cried—that’s how much he’d wanted h
er. Every night he watched as she brushed her hair a hundred strokes with a wire brush. And he simply couldn’t stop watching her, not even after she had fallen asleep. As she slept she reached out for him, she did it every night, just as every night Richard pulled her a little closer until it seemed there was only one person asleep in their bed and only one heart beating.

  But on this night Lila didn’t reach out for her husband, she didn’t even think about him. She lay in their bed and concentrated so hard that she could feel the room spin. Her blood moved faster and faster; her fingertips began to burn. After a while Lila could feel herself growing weaker, and she knew she didn’t have much more to give. The sheets beneath her were soaked with sweat and she could feel she was just about to break—her bones were rising up to the surface like fish, her skin simply couldn’t contain energy like this. And just as she was about to give up, Lila felt something move in her arms. She ground her teeth and refused to give up. She concentrated even harder, imagining every tiny finger and toe, recalling each second after her baby’s birth—the shape of her cheek, the dark eyelashes, the odor of blood and milk. At last, Lila felt a weight on the bed next to her. She held her breath and when she opened her eyes she could see, even in the dark, that her daughter was finally beside her.

  The baby’s eyes were closed, her eyelids as white as stones. Slowly, the lids fluttered, and two perfect slate-gray eyes stared up at Lila. There was an outline of light all around the baby. Even when Lila held her tighter underneath a white sheet, the outline remained. And Lila wept when she realized that her daughter knew her, she cried so many tears that in no time at all both she and her child were coated with salt.

  Out in the hallway you could see the light that surrounded the baby escape from under the bedroom door. It spread out all along the floor, into the other rooms of the house. Richard might have seen it if he hadn’t been on his back, staring at the ceiling. He wished that he were holding his wife, but by now it was after midnight and Richard wouldn’t have dreamed of disturbing Lila, any more than Lila would have thought to call out his name. Richard fell right asleep, maybe because he knew that he’d be sleeping out in the living room for a long time. And every night after that, before he went to sleep, Richard stood outside the bedroom door for a moment, and every night Lila heard him. But neither of them could go to the other; a thin sheet of glass had sprung up between them, and it separated them until they were as distant from each other as they were from the stars.