When she stood up to phone her doctor she was still dripping, amazed by how much fluid had actually been inside her. She left a message for her doctor that she would meet her at the hospital, then changed her dress.
“I want you to listen to me,” Jessup said, but Rae couldn’t. She held her hand up in the air to silence him and Jessup began to time her contraction. This time Rae imagined the moment when the horses escaped from the corral. The sound of their hoofbeats on the flat sand was deafening, the sand rose up like a twister, burning the horses’ eyes, making them wilder and a hundred times more desperate to escape.
“That one lasted for a minute and a half,” Jessup said.
Rae went into the kitchen and put out fresh water and dog food.
“Are you crazy?” Jessup said. He pulled his keys out of his pocket. “Let’s go,” he said.
“If you really want to help me you can take care of the dog.”
“Shit,” Jessup said under his breath.
“She needs to be walked three times a day.”
The dog was lying near the bed, nose buried in its paws. It watched Rae carefully, following every move she made with its eyes. Jessup glared over at it.
“All right,” he said. “All right, all right.”
But just to make sure the dog wouldn’t be locked up indefinitely if Jessup didn’t live up to his word, Rae left the kitchen window open. That way the dog could escape if it wanted to: all it had to do was climb up on a kitchen chair and leap over the window ledge. The drop was only a few feet, and under the bamboo there were soft weeds and grass.
When the next contraction came, Rae leaned up against the refrigerator and rocked back and forth. All of a sudden she wanted Lila, she nearly got lost in between the waves of the contraction.
“We’re leaving right now,” Jessup said as soon as it was over.
Rae went to the telephone, but before she could dial, Jessup took the receiver out of her hands.
“Don’t start up with me now,” Rae warned him. “I swear to God I’m dangerous.”
She grabbed at the phone, but Jessup wouldn’t let go.
“I have to call my labor coaches,” Rae yelled.
“Let me go with you,” Jessup said.
They both held on to the receiver and stared at each other.
“Please,” Jessup said.
She thought then of the one time she had gone to the apartment where Jessup had grown up. It was before she moved out to Newton; she’d been hanging around the front door of his building, hoping to see him, when his mother came home from work, carrying some groceries.
“I know you,” she said to Rae, and she’d insisted Rae come up to the apartment. Inside, the hallways were dark, and they had to walk up four flights of stairs. The apartment itself was tiny, Jessup slept on a fold-out couch in the living room. Jessup’s mother had sat Rae down at the kitchen table and made her a glass of chocolate milk. She was apologetic about everything—the lack of heat, the fact that she came home from work after six and didn’t know where her son was—as if Rae were another adult, someone she had to impress.
“I’m so glad that Jessup has friends,” his mother confided, and for a moment Rae didn’t understand. Jessup never had any friends. Then it dawned on Rae that his mother meant her.
Jessup’s mother put the groceries away, then slipped off her shoes and got herself a cup of coffee.
“He’s told me all about you,” she told Rae. “The girl with the red hair.”
Rae was too shocked to speak; she gulped her chocolate milk as she listened to the details of his birth. When, at seven, Jessup still hadn’t arrived, Rae told his mother that she had to go home. Jessup’s mother walked her to the door, and as though by agreement they stopped to look at the couch that folded out to become Jessup’s bed.
“He started walking when he was nine months old,” Jessup’s mother said proudly.
Rae’s throat had begun to hurt. She knew that if Jessup found out she’d been there, he’d never be able to face her again.
“I meant to surprise him,” she told his mother. “So maybe we’d better not tell him I was here.”
Jessup’s mother looked at Rae for a moment before she understood. “It will be our secret,” she said, and Rae knew that she was talking about more than just this one visit.
“I know I’ve made some mistakes,” Jessup was saying to her now.
“Several,” Rae agreed.
“I know it,” Jessup said. “I wanted things. I’m not going to lie to you—I still want them.”
Rae held her hand in the air so that he would stop talking. This time her contraction lasted for nearly as long as the space between it and the last one.
“Are you all right?” Jessup asked when it was over.
Rae nodded and blew out air. She had expected it to hurt, but she’d never expected this.
“I want to tell you something, so you’ll understand,” Jessup said. “I always thought you’d leave me.”
“This isn’t fair,” Rae said.
“I know,” Jessup said.
He put his arms around her when the next contraction came, and counted the seconds.
“You can drive me to the hospital, but that’s all,” Rae told him. Jessup looked so grateful that she would have laughed out loud if she could have. She pointed to her overnight bag. He picked it up and stood in the doorway, waiting, until she waved him out.
“Go on,” she told him. “I’ll meet you in the truck.”
When he left Rae could see him out the window as he crossed the courtyard; he was the exact same distance away as he’d been on those nights when Rae had looked out her bedroom window to see him out on the sidewalk. But she’d never noticed how frightened he looked from this distance, or that he had a nervous habit of rubbing his fingers together, as if he was worried that she might not appear.
Jessup threw the overnight case in the cab of the truck, started the engine, then got out and waited for her. It was dark by now, and the exhaust from the pickup was inky, the color of winter nights in Boston just before the snow begins. Rae went to her closet, steadied herself by holding on to the wall, then slipped on her red shoes. This child really was a lot like Jessup—it could hardly wait to be born. So she hurried—she bent down to stroke the dog’s head, and before she went out to cross the courtyard, she phoned Richard and Lila to tell them she was ready at last.
They both heard the phone at the same time. Richard jumped up from the couch to answer it and, out in the garden, Lila knew it was time. That afternoon she had baked a cake—she had thought she was making it for dessert that night, but when Richard went to cut a piece, she stopped him. She’d been particularly careful with the ingredients: sweet butter, a cup of sugar, milk, a spoonful of lemon rind saved from their own tree. Lila wrapped the cake in waxed paper, knowing it was a gift for Rae. As she stored it in a metal tin she wondered if she would feel jealous when the call finally came, but now that it had she was actually relieved. It was a comfort to know what you did and did not have.
While Richard made arrangements to meet Rae at the hospital, Lila heard a rustling in the grass. She knew exactly what it was. A little girl with slate-gray eyes crawled across the patio, then lifted herself onto Lila’s lap. Holding her was like trying to hold on to light, or water, or air. But when she reached up and put her arms around Lila’s neck, Lila could feel the heat of her body, and no mother, in any nursery, could have loved her child more.
Inside the house, Richard hung up the phone and rushed to the bedroom to pack the few things they might need: a change of clothes, white washcloths, a good clock with a second hand. They had already begun to plan a trip to East China, and once they went back it would be nearly summer, the lilies would have already begun to send up green shoots. Richard planned to spend most of their visit helping his father work on the house. He’d be so busy with wallpaper and leaking pipes that he’d never notice when Lila took their rented car and disappeared for an afternoon. And even if he d
id notice, he’d know enough to let it pass. He and Jason would replace the gutters on the north side of the house and fix the rotten floor boards in the porch, while Lila drove out to a place where last winter’s salt and ice had been so powerful they had cut through stone. A place where if you were standing in the right spot you could see the shadow of the moon in late afternoon, you could run your hand along a small headstone and imagine it was made out of memory and pearls and bones.
And so when the baby began to inch away, Lila didn’t try to stop her. She bit her lip until she drew two drops of blood and watched as the baby lowered herself back onto the patio. Above them the sky grew darker. The baby moved along the flat stones, past the hedges, into the neighbor’s yard. At this hour the potted gardenias next door smelled sweeter; the air was cool enough to make you shiver. Lila reached down and touched the warm slate, but when she went to look beyond the hedges there wasn’t a sign of her child. Just another garden that had to be coaxed to grow, a row of thin tomato seedlings and a bent magnolia tree.
Richard was at the screen door watching her. She could feel his presence, and when she turned he called out that it was time. Lila motioned that she would meet him in the driveway, and when Richard went to start the car Lila went inside to get the cake tin from the kitchen counter. Into this cake Lila had baked three gifts: a cool hand to test for fevers, a kiss with the power to chase away nightmares, a heart that can tell when it’s time to let go.
Outside, the car was idling and Richard had left the passenger door open. Everyone else on the block was already in bed. It was a still, blue night with no wind, a good night for sleeping, and the neighborhood was so quiet that if you listened very carefully you could hear the roses outside the front door unfolding. You could take one look at the sky and know it was the perfect time of night for a miracle.
About the Author
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. She wrote her first novel, Property Of, while studying creative writing at Stanford University, and since then has published more than thirty books for readers of all ages, including the recent New York Times bestsellers The Museum of Extraordinary Things and The Dovekeepers. Two of her novels, Practical Magic and Aquamarine, have been made into films, and Here on Earth was an Oprah’s Book Club choice. All told, Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty languages and one hundred foreign editions. She lives outside of Boston.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1985 by Alice Hoffman
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5242-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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