Fortune's Daughter (27 page)

“I swear,” Rae said, “they are.”

“There's nothing to be jealous of,” Jessup said then. “We're nothing to each other.”

Rae looked down at the sidewalk.

“I'm warning you right now,” Jessup said, “so you don't get hurt.”

When he kissed her Rae knew that she was supposed to close her eyes, but she couldn't. She had to look at him to make certain it was really happening to her because she knew that when this first kiss was over, Jessup would back away and act as if nothing between them had changed.

This time, Rae was the one who backed away. Jessup looked at her, then reached down and pulled off his boots.

“What are you doing?” Rae said.

Jessup stood up and unbuttoned his shirt.

“What does it look like I'm doing?” he said.

“You really do think I'm stupid,” Rae said.

“Go ahead,” Jessup said. “Try and tell yourself you don't want me here.”

“You should have gone out with Paulette,” Rae said. “You would have had a much better birthday with her.”

“Will you just forget about Paulette?” Jessup said. “In the first place she just got engaged to some cowboy.”

Rae bent down and got Jessup's boots, then she walked across the room, opened the front door, and threw them out into the courtyard.

“Wait a minute!” Jessup said.

Rae stood at the open door and fanned herself to cool off.

“I told you this was going to happen to you,” Jessup said. “I told you if you went ahead and got pregnant everything would change. You're not even thinking straight.”

“You selfish bastard,” Rae said. “If you think selling a few crummy horses means you're not a failure, you're wrong.”

Jessup looked at her for a moment, then he buttoned his shirt and tucked it in. “Nobody talks to me like that,” he said, and he walked right past her.

“Get out!” Rae said, even though she knew it sounded ridiculous—he already was standing in the courtyard. As she was about to slam the door behind him, Jessup grabbed it so it wouldn't budge.

“You had to go and do this on my birthday,” he said. “You had to get back at me.”

He spoke softly, almost in a whisper, but all the same Rae could tell that his voice was breaking. That was when she knew that he had come back because he needed her. On any other night it would have felt like a victory, but tonight she just felt sorry for him, and feeling that way about Jessup was the worst sort of betrayal there was. When she watched him walk across the courtyard he seemed hunched over, and Rae had the urge to run after him. But instead she closed the door and listened for his truck to start and drive away. She wondered if on that night in Boston when he told her he was leaving he had been holding his breath, desperate for her to beg to go with him. He had hidden it so well, all Rae had seen was endless courage, hot nights, a look that could make her do anything. But tonight Jessup was a thirty-year-old man who couldn't stay still long enough to last in one place. Someone who, when there was no one beside him in the passenger seat on the long ride out into the desert, wound up talking to himself for comfort. Someone who was totally exhausted when he got into the lower bunk bed in his trailer and found he still couldn't sleep.

Rae had been sure that she wouldn't be able to sleep either, but she was in bed and fast asleep long before Jessup reached the freeway. It wasn't that she didn't care any more—she did. But everything was different, in spite of what she felt. As she was falling asleep, Rae tried to picture Jessup's face and couldn't. Instead, she kept seeing the crib that was pushed up against the wall. With her eyes half closed the slats of the crib cast blue shadows across the room, and every time the headlights of a car out on the street flickered the shadows moved like water.

Sometime near dawn, Rae dreamed that she was with her mother at the house in Wellfleet. It was low tide, and you could hear the birds in the salt marsh beyond the house. They were out on the porch, and Carolyn was wearing a white summer dress, one she had owned years earlier, before Rae was born. They were facing the channel beside the marsh. It was an inlet, which whales sometimes mistook for deeper water; often, they got lost among the reeds and beached themselves, one after another. Now the channel was empty, and as smooth as glass. After a while, Rae realized that her mother was no longer beside her. When she found she was alone, Rae felt unusually calm. She leaned over the porch railing and listened to the birds, and when she looked again toward the reeds she saw that her mother's white dress was in the water, floating at the edge of the marsh, luminous as the moon.

In the morning, Rae woke up slowly. There was already the echo of traffic out on the boulevards, and a buzzing sound from one of the kitchen windows as a bee bounced against the screen. It wasn't until she got out of bed that Rae began to feel that something had changed: swinging her legs over the mattress was more difficult, walking across the room to get her robe was treacherous. Even when she looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom, it took a while before Rae realized that it was her own body that had changed. Before, all her weight had been high up, her belly pushed up toward her breasts. But sometime in the night everything had moved down—the baby had dropped, its head was down so far Rae could feel it resting against her pelvic bones. Rae let her bathrobe fall onto the tiled floor just so that she could look at herself. She stayed there so long that anyone would have thought she was terribly vain, but it was just that for the first time that she could remember she didn't wish for anything other than what she already had, and what she had was less than four weeks to go before her baby was born.

Lila and Richard had learned to be polite to each other, but their civility was so chilling it made their skins crawl. When they really tried they could actually manage to have a meal together in the same room. All they had to do was remember not to look at each other, not to ask each other for the simplest favors, not even to pass the salt, and under no circumstances could they even begin to think about what they had once had.

Nothing on earth could have made Lila turn to her husband, nothing could force her to go to him now and admit that something frightening had begun to happen—she had begun to have visions. These were no orderly prophecies that appeared when beckoned, they came suddenly, at odd hours of the day and night, and they turned time into a wicked thing. There was no way to tell if something was about to happen, or if it had already come to pass. Lila never knew if she was really in her own kitchen, pouring juice into a glass, or if she was on the banks of a frozen bay, watching her first lover, Stephen, walk past the ice fishermen on his way home. In the afternoons, when she went out to water the geraniums, Lila saw her mother out on the patio with two other girls, all of them so young you could practically hear them counting the days until summer. When she dusted in the living room there was Rae, leaning over a bassinet to croon her restless baby to sleep. Each time she went into the bathroom and turned on the light she saw herself putting the stopper in the sink and running the cold water, before she reached for the straight-edged razor and studied her own submerged arm.

These visions brought blinding headaches and a peculiar chill that wouldn't go away. Now Lila knew why Hannie had always worn too many layers of clothing: black skirts, leather boots, sweaters, shawls. Time, Hannie had told her, grew more delicate as you got older, it was so tissue thin you could hold your hand up to the light and see how tapered the fingers had been at twenty-five, how the palms had been scratched by a fall into the brambles on the morning of your eighth birthday.

Sitting at the rear table, Lila had felt more and more uncomfortable as Hannie talked about getting old.

“There must be some way to stop it,” she said.

It was a foolish remark, but Hannie didn't laugh. She nodded and bit a sugar cube in half, keeping one half between her thumb and forefinger, the other in her cheek to dissolve.

“There is a way,” she told Lila. The fortune-teller's eyes were small, and a little too bright, so that people sometimes had to look away from her for no reason at all. “But I wouldn't wish it on you.”

Lila got it into her head that Hannie knew some secret way to stay young, and already, at eighteen, she knew that certain men, like Stephen, couldn't tolerate a woman's growing old. Lila imagined that the secret was a lotion, a cream made of roses and diluted water and fruit, or a powder you dusted over each eyelid before you went to sleep. For days she pestered Hannie; she swore she wouldn't tell another soul. Hannie avoided answering; instead she told Lila the ingredients of the beauty treatments women in her village had sworn by: egg whites left on your face for one hour, cinnamon under your pillow, tea leaves mixed into your shampoo. But none of this was what Lila wanted, and she brought it up again and again, until Hannie finally gave in.

“When I was a child,” Hannie told her, “there was a woman who was so beautiful that ravens used to come to her window just to see her. At night when she went inside the moon grew duller, the frogs who sat on her front porch never made bellowing noises like the ones by the river—they sat there silently, as though they were waiting for a glimpse of her feet underneath the crack of the door. Her husband adored her, her children refused to let go of her skirts because she smelled like lavender and sweet butter. She was so beautiful that no one was jealous of her, and others enjoyed her good fortune as if it were their own.

“But then something went wrong. She cried all day and all night, there were dark circles around her eyes and her skin looked like ashes in the chimney. This is what happened: She had found some gray hairs, and that had caused her to look even closer. When she borrowed a mirror from her mother-in-law she saw wrinkles that she had never noticed before, she saw that she had begun to grow old. She wrapped herself in a quilt and slept on the wooden floor, weeping in her sleep. Her children grew thin, her husband began to lose his hair. And then, one day, she suddenly seemed herself again, only now she smiled shyly, as though she had a secret. Everyone in the village watched carefully, everyone knew that something was about to happen, and sure enough, on their way to the schoolhouse one morning, the children found her body hanging from a pine tree. She had hung herself with a white silk scarf, the same scarf she had worn at her wedding. They buried her the very same day, and from then on she was talked about so much that everyone could still see her: all they had to do was close their eyes. In time her husband came out of mourning, her children recalled her tenderly, the men in the village talked about her each time they sat down by the river and got drunk. All the women in the village knew that she had managed to stay beautiful—she had simply paid a price she would have had to pay anyway, a little later on when her skin was all wrinkled and her hair so white you couldn't see her when she bent over in the snow. And all the young women envied her courage, but the old women looked at each other and knew her for the fool that she was.”

Lila knew it was true—her daughter was the only one who didn't get lost in her confusion of time. The baby was always the same, quietly sitting on Lila's lap out in the garden, or waiting to be picked up from her bed in the dresser drawer. But the visions drained Lila's energy, and she went to her daughter less and less often. Sometimes she simply pulled a chair up beside the dresser and watched her daughter sleep. All day long she sat on a hardbacked chair, guarding her daughter, and when she went to sleep her dreams were murky so that in the morning she could never remember them.

Each day she was more on edge, and one evening in March, when the air was light and clean and the acacia tree in their neighbor's yard had begun to flower, Lila suddenly couldn't stand to have another dinner alone. She knew Richard wouldn't be back from the shop until sometime after eight, and so she took a tray out to the table on the patio. She was wearing corduroy slacks and one of Richard's wool sweaters; the evening wasn't very cool but she began to feel a chill. At first she thought it was the kind of coldness that accompanied a vision, but it was different, it was more like a steel knife that cut down her left side, from her fingertips to her chest. For some reason she couldn't smell the lemon tree, she couldn't hear jets when they passed overhead.

She was at the table, the tray of cottage cheese and fruit and iced tea right in front of her, when she began to feel paralyzed. She told herself that all she had to do was move and she'd be all right. But once she was back inside the house, it was worse. Her blood was ice. She went to the phone in the kitchen to call Richard at the shop, but she couldn't remember the number she had called a thousand times before. As she stood there Lila could swear that it was August, the air was so warm and still. She could hear someone down the hallway stir in bed. It was Janet Ross—she couldn't sleep so she got out of bed and went to the closet for her robe as the birds out on the lawn began to sing.

Lila reached up and dialed for the operator.

“I need to reach my husband,” she said as soon as the operator answered.

“Can't you dial him directly?” the operator said.

“I can't,” Lila said.

“Tell me his number,” the operator said.

But that was just it—she couldn't remember.

Outside, the birds were making a terrible racket. Lila knew that any second Janet Ross would come to the nursery, so she crouched down, next to the crib. At first she thought her daughter was sleeping, but then she saw that the baby's eyes were open. Lila leaned her face against the wooden slats of the crib, and when her daughter exhaled, Lila swallowed it in. The taste was so sweet that she knew it was a last breath. As she crouched by the crib Lila heard her baby's heart stop. Just like that, on a morning when people all over East China were sleeping beside their husbands or wives, her daughter's heart stopped beating.