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

by Alice Hoffman

  Later they learned that Los Angeles had felt only the outside circle of the earthquake. Its center was miles away, in the desert, and there the tremors were so strong they could lift a trailer right into the air and leave it lying on its side.

  Rae was at work when the earthquake struck and immediately she thought: Jessup. It was her last day at the office, and Freddy had called her in after lunch. Rae assumed she was about to be fired. At least, she’d thought, he’d had the decency to wait long enough so that her hospital bills would be covered by the health insurance.

  “Guess what?” Freddy said after she sat down on the couch and put up her feet on the coffee table. “Six theaters want to show something called Eugenie—which they tell me I own.”

  “Really?” Rae said innocently.

  “I trusted you,” Freddy said.

  “I swear to God I don’t know what made me do it,” Rae told him.

  She’d been so preoccupied, taking the dog for walks three times a day, getting the apartment ready, talking to Lila every morning on the phone for an hour, that she’d nearly forgotten she’d forged his name.

  “It won best picture in Germany,” Freddy told her.

  “Eugenie?” Rae said.

  “Lucky for you,” Freddy said. “If luck’s what it was.”

  Rae had to ask him to repeat himself when he told her he wanted her to come back after the baby, not as his secretary but as his assistant.

  “Are you trying to squeeze more money out of me?” Freddy said.

  “I’m not sure I heard you right,” Rae said. “What did you say?”

  “All right!” Freddy said. “You’ll get a raise, but it won’t be much at first.”

  He reached for a bottle of wine to celebrate with and was opening it when the tremors began. The steel girders in the building began to vibrate, the file cabinets all tilted to the right. Rae sat up straight: she imagined Jessup trapped in the trailer, pinned underneath furniture that couldn’t be moved. Freddy held the wine bottle in the air and tried to dodge the spray of rose. Afterward, they stared at each other.

  “Did that just happen?” Freddy said.

  They left the building together, by the rear stairway, and then, along with nearly everyone else in the city, they went home to see how much damage had been done. Rae could hear the dog howling inside her apartment as soon as she got out of her car, but when she unlocked her front door the dog was nowhere in sight. A framed print had fallen off the wall, and the glass had shattered and left shards in the bed; the blue-and-white dishes they had bought in Maryland had fallen out of the cupboards and cracked. Rae looked under the bed and in the front closet; she could still hear the howling, as if the sound had been trapped in the walls. The dog was in the bathroom, huddled in the tub. A long time ago, when they had lived in Florida, Rae had bought glass canisters of bath salts that had been so expensive she’d never been able to bring herself to use them. Now the bath salts were spilled in the tub, and the dog had left pawprints in the orange and blue crystals. Rae grabbed hold of the dog’s new collar and helped it out of the tub. It sat obediently on the tiled floor, still shivering, as she toweled off the bath salts that clung to its fur. She had always begged Carolyn for a dog, but after lengthy discussions with Rae’s father, the decision had always been no. It wasn’t that Carolyn didn’t like dogs, she did; on Saturday afternoons she and Rae often drove out to kennels in Concord to look at litters of golden retrievers and spaniels. But Rae and Carolyn both knew that in their house a dog was out of the question. One argument over fleas or chewed-up shoes would be enough to disrupt a peace as fragile as theirs.

  Two weeks after they ran away to Maryland, Rae went out and got a puppy, but it turned out that Jessup hated dogs. They were all right if they served a purpose—a guard dog or a sheepdog was fine—but spending his paycheck to keep a poodle in dog chow was out of the question. It wasn’t a poodle, just a mixed breed, but Rae didn’t bother to correct Jessup. She stood out on the curb as he lifted the puppy into the back seat of the Oldsmobile, and while Jessup drove back out to the animal shelter, Rae threw out the plastic water dish and the five-pound bag of dog food she had bought that morning.

  Now she was the one who wasn’t so sure she wanted the responsibility of a dog, even one that was used to no attention at all. When the phone rang, Rae told the dog to stay in the bathroom, and she ran to answer, hoping that it was Jessup calling to tell her he was all right. But it was only Richard, checking up on her—Lila had told him that a change in the atmosphere could bring on an early labor. Rae assured him that she was fine. But all over the city things had started to go wrong. Everyone said it was the earthquake; it disrupted atoms in the air, bringing out the worst you had hidden inside. The newspapers were already reporting several knife fights—each time a suspect was picked up and questioned about how the fight had begun he always looked sheepish and didn’t seem to know. The supermarket where Rae shopped was held up at gunpoint, and in a parking lot behind the drugstore a young girl was beaten and left unconscious just beyond the spot where the asphalt had buckled. There was still a trace of that hot wind, and everyone had the jitters—when you drank a glass of cold water you were likely to spill it.

  Rae didn’t bother to clean up the apartment, she sat on the bed, hoping that Jessup would phone. The phone did ring late in the evening, but it wasn’t Jessup, it was Hal, phoning from the interstate on his way back to Montana. They had lost everything. Hal had been out in the barn, Jessup inside the trailer, taking a nap. Earthquake weather had just sort of sneaked up on everyone, even the buzzards and the hawks were taken by surprise and some of them were tossed nearly half a mile from their nests. The bunkbed had overturned on top of Jessup, and after he’d gotten out from under it, he’d kicked down the door to the trailer and climbed outside. Hal watched from the doorway of the barn as Jessup ran toward the corral, but it was too late. Anyone could have told him that. They’d never rebuilt it, and the wooden fence had split in two. Horses ran through the opening, the herd so close together it seemed like one animal. As the earth shifted, the sand moved like water, the wind was getting hotter all the time, and you could hear wind chimes in the distance, rattling like mad. Jessup had run over to the corral so fast that he had to bend over, low to the ground, just to catch his breath. By the time he stood back up, the horses were running toward the mountains, a trail of sand rising up behind them like a white wall.

  Hal and Jessup had just stood there for a while, then Hal had gone into the trailer to see what he could salvage. As he picked through the mess Hal heard the engine of the pickup start, and when he came out, holding an armful of laundry, he saw Jessup driving away from the ranch at top speed. Hal filled the trunk of his car with everything he owned that hadn’t been broken or ruined; then he drove into town. He’d managed to talk the sheriff into letting him go up in one of the helicopters searching for missing livestock.

  From the air they could see cracks in the earth, and to Hal it seemed that those cracks were already filling with sand. In no time it would seem as if the earthquake had never even happened. There were a few cows and sheep up in the mountains, stumbling along the unfamiliar territory, and Hal found himself wondering if their horses had ever existed, that’s how absolute their disappearance was, not one hoofprint, not one hair from a tail or a mane. There was no chance that the state emergency fund would reimburse them for the lost horses. Jessup had had his own ideas about tax evasion, so they’d listed their stock with the authorities as six horses rather than thirty. Hal was heading back home, and if he ever found anyone stupid enough to buy the land, he’d send Rae a check for half.

  “And the thing that really gets me about Jessup,” Hal told her, “is that he didn’t see me standing behind him. He didn’t even stop to find out whether or not I’d broken my neck. He just took off.”

  After she hung up the phone, Rae cleaned up the worst of the mess in the apartment. She had forgotten about dinner, so now she opened up two cans of tuna—one for he
rself, the other for the dog. She called to the dog sharply, but when it came into the kitchen she patted its head, and they ate dinner together and then went for a walk around the block. Outside you could hear buzz saws all over the city as road crews began to remove the fallen trees and telephone poles. In the distance there was the sound of sirens, and once the dog startled Rae by throwing back its head and howling along with an ambulance. They walked around the block slowly; the air turned foggy and thick now that the hot wind from the earthquake had settled down; the ground was steaming.

  When they got back to the courtyard the dog turned toward the street and barked, and Rae looked behind her. For a moment she thought she saw a pickup truck, parked near the entrance to the apartment complex. The fog had grown so thick that Rae couldn’t see any farther than the forgotten strand of Christmas lights stretched across the dark courtyard; tonight they were as disconcerting as fallen stars. The dog headed to the apartment, and Rae followed. Once they were inside, she double-locked the door.

  The earth had already begun to settle, but that night everyone moved with caution getting into bed, as if anything might happen while you slept. The dog lay down beside the bed; it was so quiet that twice Rae reached down and touched its head, just to make certain she wasn’t alone. She felt more a captive of her own body than ever—she longed to sleep on her stomach, her ribs and back ached. In the dark she could hear her own pulse, and it seemed too loud and too fast. Her pregnancy felt like a bottomless pool, and now that she had jumped and the water was almost over her head, she could not imagine why she had ever made this leap. Even though she now knew that Lila would be there with her in the labor room if she wanted her, something was missing. It wasn’t just that Jessup had disappeared, it was the feeling that she was having this baby without having had any past of her own. Who would send presents, who would look for photographs of her as an infant so that she could compare and see if the baby took after her?

  As she fell asleep Rae found herself trying to imagine Carolyn on the day of her own birth. She knew only this: It had taken two days for her to be born. For two days her father had sat in the waiting room, he had shaved in the visitor’s washroom and ordered sandwiches delivered from a deli down the street. Down the hall, Carolyn had to be strapped into her bed. At the very end, when she couldn’t stand it any more, they gave her Demerol, but it didn’t last long enough, and when it wore off she begged them for more. For an hour they left her there, strapped to the bed, and when it came time for the baby to be delivered they told her about something called twilight sleep and then hooked an IV to her arm. After that the pain grew worse, too enormous to respond to, but she wasn’t really there. She could hear herself screaming, yet she was detached, and although the nurse swore they had shown her the baby the moment she was born, Carolyn couldn’t remember a thing about it, and when she was given her daughter to hold she held on tight, for fear it might be discovered that she hadn’t really had a baby at all.

  That night Rae had no dreams, as if she’d been given twilight sleep herself, and when she woke in the morning she realized that she’d been crying in her sleep. She had a cup of tea, then gave the dog two of the Pet Tabs she’d gotten at the vet. When they went out for a walk the air seemed back to normal, the flawless blue air of April. The dog carefully kept pace alongside Rae, but the one habit Rae hadn’t been able to break it of was chasing birds, and it took off, behind some bushes, after a pair of jays. Rae clapped her hands and whistled, and as she waited for the dog to grow tired and trot back down the sidewalk she decided that she wasn’t quite as prepared for the baby as she’d thought. The nightgowns and crib sheets were laundered twice and carefully folded, the hats threaded with ribbons were stacked in a neat pile, the medicine chest was stocked with Vaseline and cotton and rubbing alcohol. But there was still one more thing she needed, and she clipped the dog’s leash on so that it wouldn’t run off again, and went right back to her apartment. She got her car keys and her pocketbook, and then she went out and spent the rest of the day shopping for a pair of red shoes.

  By the time Rae was ten days overdue, Richard and Lila had played a hundred games of gin rummy. They played at the kitchen table and they kept score. There was anticipation in everything they did, and each morning when Rae phoned to tell them still nothing had happened, they looked at each other and sighed. At night they both heard Rae’s relaxation tape in their dreams—the sound of wind chimes, two flutes playing scales. Richard had taught Lila all of the breathing techniques, and he didn’t hide his great relief that both of them would be there in the labor room with Rae. But secretly Lila wasn’t certain that she’d go through with it.

  Richard had decided to take care of the earthquake damage himself; instead of calling the tree service Lila had found in the phone book, he borrowed a saw from their next-door neighbor and began to cut the lemon tree into logs. He had already collected all the lemons from the ground, and each day Lila made a fresh pitcher of lemonade. When there were only three lemons left, Lila made one last pitcherful, and as she stirred in a cup of sugar she suddenly realized that if they had had a child together it would have been long gone, to a separate life, to a family of its own, and it would have been just the two of them in this house anyway. When she took Richard a glass of lemonade he switched off the buzz saw and drank the whole glass without pausing. All around them the air smelled sweet; if they saved the logs and rationed them carefully in the small fireplace in the living room they might be able to capture the scent of lemons all that next winter. They could hold hands in the dark and watch the wood burn from November to March, and each time it rained it would seem like April in their house.

  Richard bent down and put his empty glass alongside the tree stump. When he stood up his back cracked. He couldn’t use the saw for more than an hour without feeling it that night, and the job was taking him days longer than he’d planned.

  “Maybe I should have hired a kid to do this,” he said now. “Maybe it was a mistake not to call a service that would come and dynamite the stump.” He surveyed his work and looked puzzled; the more logs he cut, the more wood there seemed to be still left to cut. “I should have been able to cut this all in one day,” Richard said.

  He seemed so fragile that Lila put her arms around him, and she stayed out there with him, sitting in the sun while he cut more wood. She thought of Hannie, who had been married less than a year when her husband had gone off with the other men in the village to buy grain, and had then disappeared. A sudden autumn storm had trapped the men in the woods; at night the people in the village could hear wolves howling, but there was nothing they could do. Later, four of the men were found in the woods, buried under new drifts of snow. All of the sixteen women who had become widows mourned their husbands together, but as she sat on a wooden crate in the ashes with the line of other women, Hannie had felt nothing at all—she was already pregnant but she barely knew her husband, she couldn’t even remember what his favorite meal had been.

  When Lila looked at Richard, she remembered everything about him. The way the bed creaked when he sat down and pulled off his shoes, the smell of blueberry pancakes, his favorite breakfast, on Sunday mornings. When she looked at him carefully she could see the boy he used to be, right there beneath his skin, and she had the urge to kiss him. Soon Richard finished cutting logs, and he came to sit next to her in a wrought-iron chair. Lila felt herself grow excited. When he looked at her that way she knew he was seeing her for who she really was.

  That night they went to bed early, and they took off their clothes under the covers and laughed the way they used to when it was freezing cold in their bedroom in East China. When they made love they felt each other’s bodies, but they also could feel the way they used to be, and the delight of knowing somebody so well was so staggering it made them weep and hold each other tight all night long.

  On the morning when Rae was eleven days past her due date, Lila woke up with a lump in her throat. All that night she had dreamed of Hannie, and n
ow she remembered the reason Hannie had come to New York in the first place: she had lost her son in the war. It had been the worst winter anyone could remember; the ice was thick enough to swallow you alive. Thousands had been left homeless and they wandered from village to village, stealing from root cellars and begging for food. When the mayor came to tell Hannie that her son had been killed, she couldn’t contain her grief, her screams could be heard all over the village, and mothers held their hands over their children’s ears. Hannie’s son had been a soldier, but to her he was still a boy. Her neighbors built up the fire in her stove, but once they had gone out to bring her some soup, Hannie locked her door and wouldn’t let them back in. She sat there by the stove, with a blanket around her, and as the night grew later, her grief grew as well. When her neighbors pounded on her door, Hannie ignored them. What good were they to her—they couldn’t tell her what she wanted to know. She was obsessed with finding out the way her son died—if he had been in pain, if the end had been quick, if he had called out for her as he lay dying. After a while she convinced herself that he had—he had wanted his mother, and no one had come to him.

  There was a storm that night, and the wind was fierce. Every now and then, Hannie heard a pounding on her door, but she didn’t move to answer it. Her despair was blinding, it did away with time. When she called out to her son, she swore she could hear his childish voice answer and call her Mama. Finally, she fell asleep, and as she slept the drifts outside grew higher and the fire in the stove went out and a trail of smoke floated between the ceiling and the floor. When she woke up, Hannie opened the window and waved the smoke outside. Then she went to the door. It was jammed, and she had to push harder and harder. At last it fell away. The sunlight was so harsh that Hannie held one arm over her eyes to shield them, but of course she could see what had been against her door, and her blood drained away. It was a boy of ten, one of the many homeless, and he’d been frozen to the ground, his hands still reaching for the door. It had been his voice she’d heard all night, he’d been the one crying for his mother, and no one had come to him, no one had lifted him out of the ice to carry him home.