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

by Alice Hoffman

“I have to get to Beekman Hospital,” Ann told him.

  Now that she was sitting down she could feel that, tucked inside her coat, the baby was still breathing.

  In the back seat was a couple who had been stranded uptown; because all the hotels were full, they had offered the cab driver a hundred dollars to take them home to Brooklyn. Ann looked slightly crazy to them—every strand of her hair was covered by ice, and under the yellow light of a street lamp they could see that there was dried blood on her hands.

  “Take her wherever she wants to go,” they advised the cab driver, and that was when Ann considered not giving the baby up, that was when it just seemed too cold.

  Dr. Marshall was asleep on the couch in his office. Ann woke him, then stood by the desk as he called the couple on Long Island whom he’d promised the baby to earlier that night. She didn’t hear a word he said to them; she was listening to the baby’s even breathing from deep within her winter coat. Finally, she handed the baby to Dr. Marshall so that he could examine her and put her footprint on a birth certificate made out in the adoptive parents’ names. He wanted to take the baby upstairs, but Ann wasn’t ready to hand her over. She asked if she could be the one to carry her to the nursery.

  That night there were nearly a dozen other newborns in bassinets, and for some reason none of them were crying. A night nurse sat in a rocking chair, but she had fallen asleep, and when Ann placed the baby in an empty bassinet there wasn’t a sound in all of the nursery. She walked all the way to the apartment she shared with three other nurses. By now, it was a beautiful night, so clear that you could see Orion just above the roofs of the tallest buildings.

  After that night Ann just couldn’t bear to see Dr. Marshall any more. When he came into the emergency room the next morning to admit one of his patients who had gone into labor, Ann hid in the toilet until he was gone. Later, she went up to the nursery, but the baby was already gone. Whatever spell there had been the night before had been broken—all the babies were crying in unison, and the attention of five nurses couldn’t soothe them. A few weeks later, Ann applied for a job at New York Hospital and moved uptown. There were times when she simply refused to meet old friends downtown. And when she got married and was living in Connecticut, she was grateful that she no longer had to walk past the maternity ward or the nursery and feel she had helped ruin somebody’s life each time she heard a baby cry.

  “I need to know their name,” Lila said evenly.

  Ann looked over at her, confused.

  Lila’s voice rose dangerously. “Tell me the name of the people who took her to Long Island.”

  “I already told you,” Ann said. “I didn’t listen when Marshall phoned them. It didn’t seem to matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lila said. “Can’t you remember?”

  “I can’t,” Ann said. “But I know who could—Dr. Marshall.”

  They went into the kitchen together, and Lila stood right next to her cousin as she called Beekman Hospital. Marshall hadn’t been affiliated with Beekman since his residency, but if they waited the address of his private practice could easily be found. Lila couldn’t wait; she went back out to the living room and stood by the window. She was so close that she could hear her daughter breathing, buttoned up inside Ann’s winter coat; she could hear the taxi skidding across the avenue as the driver stomped on his brakes. If she had been the one in that taxi she would have never let that driver stop, she would have persuaded him to drive all night, and by the time they reached New Jersey her daughter would have been sleeping and the ice on the highways would have melted and refrozen into daggers, so that anyone who tried to follow them would have gotten no farther than the first dangerous corner.

  Ann wrote Dr. Marshall’s address and phone number on a yellow slip of paper, and Lila quickly folded it and put it in her coat pocket. When Ann walked her out to the elevator neither woman could look at the other; it was as if what had once happened to them was so private they couldn’t allow themselves to acknowledge it. But when the door to the elevator opened, Ann put a hand on Lila’s arm to stop her.

  “I always wondered if you blamed me,” Ann said.

  “Of course not,” Lila said, and when she kissed her cousin goodbye anyone could tell that the only one she had ever blamed was herself.

  It was late afternoon and already dark when Lila walked back to her hotel. But once she got to the Hilton, she didn’t stop, she continued walking, west and downtown. Each time she put her hand in her coat pocket to feel the slip of paper there, she felt a jolt; she was on the very edge—if she took one more step forward, she could never go back. Each time she tried to imagine going to see her daughter she couldn’t seem to get any farther than the front door. When she reached for the bell she was put off by some terrible heat, and when she finally forced herself to ring the bell it left its burning black imprint on her flesh. She was so terrified of her daughter’s reaction that she simply disappeared, and each time her daughter opened the door there was no one on the front porch, just two black feathers and a rush of cold air.

  If she backed off now she could take the limousine back to Kennedy and be home tonight. She could watch Richard prune the rose bushes and then lead him into the bedroom and lie down beside him as though she had never been gone. And so each time Lila passed a phone booth and considered stopping to phone Dr. Marshall she kept on walking, and she knew that once she had her daughter’s address she would have to go on and that nothing would ever be the same again. She walked until it grew too late to call the doctor’s office; the streets became crowded with people on their way home from work, and in apartments above her lights were turned on, and ovens were lit to cook supper.

  Tenth Avenue was exactly as she remembered it; when the wind came up across the river on a dark January evening it was still the coldest place in the city. If you stood on the corner facing west you could be sure your eyes would tear as you felt the pull of the river. It was colder by only a degree or two, but it was enough to make you feel it, enough to make you shiver as you waited for the first stars to appear in the sky.

  If she could have found her way on the cobblestone streets beyond the avenue, if Hannie were still alive, she would have begged the old fortune-teller for advice. She needed someone to tell her what to do: this way hope, this way despair. She stood on the corner for longer than she should have, and when she finally hailed a cab the palms of her hands had turned blue. That night she was still undecided; she phoned the airlines for times of departures to L.A., she took out the slip of paper with Dr. Marshall’s address and looked at it a thousand times. She couldn’t eat dinner, and she was afraid to sleep. But when it was very late she had to lie down, just for a moment, and as soon as she closed her eyes she could feel herself begin to drift. When she dreamed, she dreamed of Hannie. They were two crows, high above the earth. Lila tried to hide it, but the scent of fear was all over her, and she was ashamed for Hannie to know what a coward she was. They were flying over a place where there were black hills; below them women prepared for a birth. From the air they could see that white sheets had been raised on poles to form a tent. There were ripples in the sheets, and the women had left footprints in the earth that looked like marks made by crows. There were more than a dozen women below them, and even though they seemed not to hurry, they were a hundred times faster than the crows flying above them.

  “I can’t do this,” Lila called to Hannie, but the air was so thin she couldn’t be heard. All anyone could hear was the sound of the wind. In the center of the sky the sun grew hotter and hotter, and the wind began to smell like fire.

  When the women reached the tent, each one knelt on the ground. In the air, Lila struggled to keep up with Hannie. When the old woman flew lower Lila followed her, even though the air currents were against her and she could feel tiny bones in her wings breaking.

  She thought to herself, It’s too late, and she watched as Hannie took to the earth so quickly that her feathers were set on fire by pure speed. The w
omen had begun to sing; the sound was closer all the time, and it went right through Lila. She was falling; it was a drop of twenty stories below her. The tent seemed much more beautiful than clouds, whiter than stars. She just gave in to it then, she let herself fall without a fight, even though the heat was getting stronger all the time. She could actually smell the burning feathers, and then the scent of black earth. Above her the air was cool and blue and so much easier to breathe. But it was such an enormous relief to finally let go that she couldn’t stop herself from weeping as she floated into her own shadow and, once and for all, gave up struggling against the delirious pull of gravity.

  She needed to get in to see Dr. Marshall without his suspecting anything, and because he wasn’t taking any new patients, Lila had to lie to his secretary. She insisted that she had been a patient years ago, that she had just moved back to the city and was desperate: she had found a lump in her breast. She had to wait four days until he could fit her in. She should have been nervous, there was enough empty time to imagine the worst: medical files lost in a fire, doors slammed in her face, a squad car called to oust her from the doctor’s office. But instead, Lila began to feel calmer, and each day she was more convinced that it was only a matter of hours before she would have her daughter back again.

  Each time she closed her eyes Lila could see the blue inlets of Connecticut that her daughter must have seen when they first brought her out to Long Island. At night her daughter heard gulls overhead, and in the summertime mimosas grew outside her bedroom window. At the far end of the hallway, in a room where there was a double bed and heavy pine furniture, the people who claimed to be her parents slept, never guessing that in her small white room Lila’s daughter closed the door and dreamed about her real mother.

  In the morning, when the smell of bacon filtered through the house and they called upstairs to her, Lila’s daughter was still dreaming: somewhere there was a woman with blue eyes who had to brush her hair a hundred strokes each night, just as she did, so that the knots would untangle. She was always polite to them at breakfast, but they could tell she wasn’t really with them. On days when there were snowstorms or when she had the flu, she felt particularly trapped—the couple at the far end of the hallway became, momentarily, her keepers. But all she had to do was look up into a night that was filled with stars and she knew that she was leaving them: in her mind she was already with her true mother.

  When they finally sat her down in the living room to tell her that she’d been adopted she nodded and smiled; she didn’t want to hurt them by telling them she had always known she wasn’t theirs. She just continued to do what she’d done all along: wait for her mother to appear. On the day of her high-school graduation, on her wedding day, on the morning after the birth of her first child, she waited. Soon she had another child, and her son and daughter were so talented they could swim like fish and recite the alphabet backward before their second birthdays, and when you held them their skin gave off the scent of oranges. On dark nights she kept a candle in the front window and she had her husband put a spotlight up over the garage so that the path to their house was well lit. Every year on Mother’s Day she sat out on the front porch, even when it was pouring rain, and she waited for her mother until long after dark, still hoping that this might be the day.

  When they were reunited Lila would give her daughter everything she hadn’t been able to before. She bought a cashmere sweater at Lord & Taylor, a silk scarf at Bloomingdale’s, a pair of small opal earrings at a jewelry shop on Madison Avenue. She kept writing checks and didn’t even bother to enter the amounts on the stubs, and at night she sat on the floor in her hotel room and carefully wrapped each gift in imported wrapping paper that was so delicate it shredded if you unfolded it too quickly. Only on the day of her doctor’s appointment did she begin to feel a sense of dread. She was in the shower, with the water turned on very hot, when she distinctly heard a train whistle. She held on to the metal railing in the shower stall, but the train was so close that the railing had begun to rattle. It was one of the old trains that the Long Island Rail Road still used on routes that were no longer well traveled. There was a long stretch of frozen tracks, and the snow was so blinding that Lila had to reach for her sunglasses. But once she got to East China, once she was standing in the front yard of her in-laws’ house, it was so warm that she didn’t even need a sweater. She could see herself right there, under the pine trees, but when she opened her mouth to speak nothing came out but a stone.

  Lila turned off the water and got out of the shower as fast as she could. She could still taste the cold weight of that stone in her mouth. She quickly got dressed and went down to get a cab, but when she got into the back seat she found that she’d lost her voice and it was a few moments before she could tell the driver where she wanted to go. In the doctor’s office she filled out a medical history with false information, then waited for nearly half an hour. A nurse led her into the consultation office, and that was when Lila realized how unsteady she was.

  Dr. Marshall had already begun to read her invented medical history. Lila sat absolutely still in a chair across from him; outside, in an alleyway, the garbage was being collected and metal cans hit hard against the pavement.

  “You’ve found a lump in your breast,” the doctor said, concerned.

  Lila kept her hands folded in her lap, but she could feel the blood running through them until each finger was amazingly hot.

  “No,” Lila said. “I haven’t.”

  Dr. Marshall was confused, and he looked back down at her history.

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” Lila said. “You placed her with a family on Long Island twenty-seven years ago, and I want her back.”

  “I think you’ve made a mistake,” Dr. Marshall said.

  “It was during the ice storm,” Lila told him.

  The door to the office had been left ajar; now the doctor got up and closed it. Lila sat calmly in the leather chair, but she could feel her heart racing.

  “What do you want?” Dr. Marshall asked.

  “I told you,” Lila said. “Just give me an address.”

  “You don’t understand,” the doctor said. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

  “You can,” Lila insisted.

  He told her that it was too late; her daughter was a grown woman, with parents, a history, a life of her own. But he couldn’t talk Lila out of it. Nothing he could say would erase her small bed drenched with milk or the three weeks afterward when she bled every time she walked down the hall to the bathroom, and everything she owned became stained with blood.

  “You think I don’t have any sympathy for you, but I do,” Dr. Marshall said. “If you had come to me the next day, or even the next week, I might have been able to do something.”

  “I was eighteen years old,” Lila said. “I couldn’t.”

  “I don’t think you’re listening to me,” the doctor said.

  She tried to explain what the moments just before the birth were like, how it was to touch your belly and know that inside there was a perfect mouth, eyes that already blinked, fingers that opened and closed, searching for something to hold on to. Inside your own body was another, you could feel the pressure of its head until the moment when it was half inside you and half lost to you forever, slipping farther and farther away with every second, with each heartbeat.

  “I don’t see how I can do what you’re asking,” Dr. Marshall said.

  Lila put one hand on her forehead and rubbed her temples.

  “I don’t see how you can’t,” she said.

  When the nurse in the reception room buzzed the intercom, Dr. Marshall picked up and told her he wasn’t taking calls. Then he turned to Lila.

  “I have two daughters myself,” he said.

  Lila looked at him carefully. He leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses, and Lila saw that something was wrong with one of his eyes—it was milky and unfocused. She forced herself to look away so she wouldn’t feel anything
for him. Lila could tell, already, that he was about to reveal something, and she also knew that afterward there wouldn’t be a day when he wouldn’t feel he’d compromised himself.

  “I raised those girls and I still have times when I feel like they’re total strangers. I’m just warning you—you don’t know how disappointed you can be after twenty-seven years.”

  “You don’t know how much you can still regret something after twenty-seven years,” Lila said.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” Dr. Marshall asked Lila.

  Lila shook her head no, but the doctor stood up and took two ceramic mugs from the top of one of the filing cabinets behind his desk.

  “I strongly recommend some coffee,” he told her. Lila looked up at him. “All right,” she said.

  “Their last name was Ross;” the doctor said. “Naturally, I’m trusting you not to go through my files while I’m out of the room.”

  “Naturally,” Lila said.

  “I don’t approve of this,” Dr. Marshall said.

  “I know,” Lila said.

  “Cream and sugar all right?” he asked.

  “Perfect,” Lila told him. “Thank you.”

  He went to the kitchenette down the hall, giving her ten minutes. When he came back to the office, carrying two mugs of coffee, she was gone. The file drawer on the far left had been opened and Dr. Marshall closed it. Then he drank both cups of coffee, even though he never took cream. He was tired, and his left eye was acting up so that things looked blurry. He had four more patients and a train ride to go before the end of the day, and it was one of those winter afternoons when the day already seems over at four o’clock, and everyone is tired and ready to quit much too early. Still, he wished he could have seen the look on her face when she’d finally gotten what she wanted. He never once guessed that Lila didn’t even look at the file after she’d found it. She just took it out of the drawer and slipped it inside her coat. She didn’t look at it out on the street, or even in the cab back to the hotel. She waited until she could sit down in the chair by the window. She waited until the sky was dark and the lights below her were turned on. And if the doctor had been able to see the look on her face, he would have been disappointed. Lila’s face didn’t give anything away. And when she really thought about it, she wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that her daughter had been given to a couple in East China, and that she had spent her first day on the same train Lila later took out, in that particularly cold winter when the Sound froze over and you could walk over the waves, all the way to Connecticut.