Fortune's Daughter

by Alice Hoffman

  But even though she had tricked Lila into leaving, Janet couldn’t stop thinking about her, and that night she went down to the cellar and for the first time in twenty-seven years she opened the cardboard boxes. It was cold in the cellar, but when she opened the first box Janet felt a rush of heat, as if some of the air from that August had been trapped inside when Lewis first sealed the boxes. She put her flashlight down on the floor and took out the photo album. She had to force herself to go on past the first picture, taken the first week after they had brought her home. How could they have thought that anything so beautiful, so perfect, could last? In every photograph Susan seemed to be leaving them behind, calmly departing, and it suddenly seemed silly to Janet that she had ever thought of Susan as hers. It was just that for a little while she had been allowed to take care of her, and even if she told Lila the truth she couldn’t lose someone she had never really had.

  They could hear the scrape of the rake outside as Jason Grey cleared out the driveway. Lila sat perfectly still and although she thought to herself over and over, She’s a liar, she knew it was all true. It was the kind of truth you feel in your bones. The sudden knowledge that there was nothing at all wrong with Rae’s child nearly made Lila cry out loud; it was her own child who had surfaced from the bottom of the cup. It was her own bad fortune.

  “Maybe I’ve been waiting for you to come back for her all this time,” Janet Ross said quietly. “But you don’t have to tell me how I failed. Believe me. I know.”

  That August had been the best time in Lila’s life. The sunlight had been so bright you could see only certain things: a thin gold wedding band, the reedy stalks of orange lilies that grew by the back door, the line of Richard’s shoulder when he turned to her in bed.

  Janet Ross slid a photograph album across the coffee table between them.

  “I brought this for you,” she said.

  Lila planned to say, I don’t want it, my daughter is twenty-seven years old, today is her birthday, she lives somewhere right here in this town, she has children of her own, and she’s been waiting for me, every day she opens the back door and looks out across the lawn and expects to see me. But when she tried to speak she couldn’t, and though she tried to stop herself she reached for the album on the coffee table. The baby nearly jumped out at her. She was sitting in the backyard, on Janet Ross’s lap underneath a mimosa tree, and her eyes were so alive they couldn’t be held back by the confines of the paper. Lila could feel a sharp pain all along her left side. The child was stunning, but Lila had already decided—she was not her daughter.

  “She doesn’t look anything like me,” Lila said, and as she spoke she could feel the cold, round shape of the words drop from her mouth.

  “I brought this, too,” Janet said. She took a small white sweater out of her pocketbook and gently placed it on the coffee table. “She looked beautiful in anything you put on her, pastels, stripes, anything at all.”

  Jason Grey had never believed in using anything stronger than a sixty-watt bulb, though the pines made the parlor dark all day long. But even in the dim light, even though Janet Ross had turned her face away, Lila could tell that she was crying. Lila closed the photograph album and went to sit next to her on the couch. Janet wiped her tears with the backs of her hands and laughed.

  “If my husband goes down to the cellar before I clean up he’ll probably wonder if a robber’s been there. He’ll wonder why anyone in their right mind would pick those old boxes to go through.”

  Lila couldn’t take her eyes off Janet, and she found herself calmly thinking: So that’s how it feels. Janet’s sense of loss was all over her, in the way she buttoned her coat to leave, in the angle of her shoulders. When she compared her absolute lack of feeling to Janet’s grief, Lila couldn’t even bring herself to feel guilt—only uselessness. Outside it was even warmer than Los Angeles on a winter day; the earth had begun to steam, giving off moisture in little gasps. And Lila knew one thing for certain: She was not about to lose her daughter this way.

  When Lila slid the photograph album back onto Janet Ross’s lap, Janet looked over at her, confused.

  “I brought it for you,” Janet said.

  Maybe she should have felt grateful: here was the woman who sat up nights mixing formula, rocking back and forth in the rocking chair, not daring to go back to her own bed, even though the baby’s breathing was fine and the intercom was switched on. But the truth was that the one time in her life when Lila was about to do something that seemed selfless, she was feeling nothing at all.

  “You take this all home with you,” Lila insisted; “She was your daughter.”

  That evening Lila and Jason Grey sat in the kitchen and had a supper of coffee and sandwiches. They could feel the drop in the temperature and they knew it was about to snow.

  Jason had been watching her all evening and now he said carefully, “I liked that visitor of yours. Nice lady.”

  For the first time since she’d come back Lila realized just how cold this old house was.

  “I think I might go back to California,” she said.

  Jason nodded. “They’re predicting a hell of a February. Wherever you look you’re going to see snow.”

  “I don’t see how you stand it,” Lila said, and they both knew she wasn’t talking about the snow.

  “I’ll tell you what the hard part is,” Jason Grey said. “It’s not feeling Helen’s not with me—I feel like she’s with me all the time. It’s letting her go. After all, it’s pretty selfish trying to keep her here with me in this house, so every once in a while I just remind myself to let her go.”

  That night, before she went to bed, Lila went around the house, turning off all the lights. In the parlor, her father-in-law was already asleep, and when Lila went over to turn out the lamp near his cot she saw that Janet Ross had left behind the small white sweater, neatly folded on the coffee table. Lila hesitated, but then she picked it up and discovered that the sweater was warm, as if it had just been worn.

  She went upstairs, brushed her hair, and undressed; and when she got into bed she took the sweater in with her and held it against her chest. Everything in the room was faintly orange from the light of the kerosene heater, and outside the window, above the pine trees, the moon had a hazy ring around it, promising snow. Lila brought her knees up to her chest, and she rocked back and forth; in no time at all she was holding her daughter in her arms. She hadn’t changed since the day she was born, she wasn’t one minute older. And as Lila rocked her baby to sleep she closed her eyes and couldn’t help thinking that Jason Grey could do whatever he wanted. It wasn’t her baby that Janet Ross had been talking about, and she wasn’t about to let her daughter go.

  By morning nearly a foot of snow had fallen; the drifts reached the center of the front door and it took Lila and Jason Grey nearly two hours to dig the car out so that Jason could drive her to the airport. The last thing Lila had packed was the white wool sweater, and once they had gotten the car started, she kept the suitcase on her lap. At the edge of the driveway, just before they turned left onto the East China Highway, Lila felt a brief surge of pity for Janet Ross. But then, it didn’t really concern her. She had found her daughter after all, and all the way to the airport she kept her left hand on her suitcase and she swore she could feel a heartbeat, as if she had hidden inside her suitcase a child so perfect and small no one else could see her, a baby who needed to be held all night, and gently rocked to sleep.

  PART FIVE

  THEY WERE ON THE FLOOR IN the living room, so intent on their breathing techniques that they hadn’t heard her come in. As she watched from the hallway, Lila felt a coldness settle around her. Rae lay on a bed of pillows, her knees drawn up, eyes closed. She exhaled rapidly, as if she were blowing out an endless row of matches. Richard was right beside her, staring at his watch and counting out the seconds. On the coffee table there was a tape recorder, but instead of music there was the echo of wind chimes, brittle and cool and clear. It was the kind of sound
that went right through you and made you realize that if you weren’t lonely already, you would be soon.

  When she had had enough, Lila dropped her suitcase so that it fell to the floor with a thud. They both sat up, startled, and turned toward the hallway. It was late afternoon, and so quiet you could hear air currents move through the room. The light that came in through the drapes was opalescent; everyone got lost in its shadows, you had to blink twice just to see straight. Except Lila, to whom everything was now obvious. For the past six hours, as she traveled between New York and Los Angeles, Lila had been wondering how she could walk in and resume her old life. Now, in an instant, she saw that she simply could not.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” she told them.

  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 he
r 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 despair—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.