Fortune's Daughter (8 page)

That night they went out to dinner; they ordered hamburgers and played the jukebox and tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. On the drive back to the Holiday Inn a wind came up suddenly; sand whipped around the Oldsmobile and Jessup had to switch on the windshield wipers in order to see the road. Rae heard the sound of wind chimes each time they passed a house or a trailer, and even though Jessup told her that people in the desert believed the chimes brought good luck, the sound put Rae on edge. The temperature had dropped nearly twenty degrees, but when they reached the motel the wind had begun to die down and Rae saw millions of stars above them. Jessup opened the door to his room, but Rae just leaned over the balcony railing. The night was black and white and so breathtakingly clear that she felt she had never seen the sky before.

Finally, Rae went in. She took off all her clothes and got under the covers. Jessup left a wake-up call for seven, then took off his boots, undressed, and turned out the lights. After he'd gotten into bed he didn't touch her.

“I've been trying to think of ways to explain what went wrong,” Jessup said. He reached for his cigarettes in the dark, and when he lit a match Rae blinked in the sudden light.

“It's like I've been dreaming all these years and I suddenly woke up,” Jessup said. “And here I am. Almost thirty.”

The window in the room was open. It was the time when coyotes came down from the ridgetops; you could hear them howling as the moon rose higher in the sky. As she lay in bed Rae listened to the wind chimes out on the balcony; cars pulled into the parking lot, they idled, then cut their engines.

“I'm glad you woke up,” Rae said bitterly.

“Don't take it personally,” Jessup told her. “You know what I mean.”

“Well, if you're planning to leave me we may have a problem,” Rae said. She could feel Jessup's weight on the mattress; each time he breathed they shifted a little closer together. “The problem is,” Rae said, “I'm pregnant.”

Jessup reached for a glass ashtray and stubbed his cigarette out. When he put his head back on the pillow, Rae knew it was over.

“Are you saying you think you're pregnant or you know you're pregnant?”

“I know,” Rae said.

“There are plenty of times you say you know something, and then I find out you've made a mistake.”

“Jessup,” Rae said. “I know.”

Jessup sat up in bed with his back toward her. In the room next door someone turned on the television and muted voices drifted through the wall.

“Look, I'm sorry,” Jessup said finally, “but this is impossible. I'm not ready for this.”

Lately, Rae had the sense that everything that was happening to her was really happening to someone else. She pinched her thigh until she could feel the bite of her own fingernails.

“I appreciate the fact that this is a serious situation,” Jessup said. “I really do. But what the hell do you expect me to do about it?”

She didn't have an answer.

“I'm not going to be somebody's father.”

If he were anyone but Jessup, Rae would have sworn he was about to cry.

“Here I am in the middle of some sort of crisis and you come and tell me you're pregnant.”

She knew it for sure now, he was crying. She was glad the lights were out and she didn't have to see it. She wasn't angry with him any more, just tired.

“We don't have to talk about it now,” Rae told him. “We'll talk tomorrow.” She put her arms around him and pretended not to know he was crying.

“It's not like I don't miss you,” Jessup told her. “I don't want to, but there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it.”

She held him until he fell asleep, and then she moved back to her side of the bed. Long after midnight, when she was finally able to sleep, Rae dreamed that she left Jessup in bed and went to the window. She opened it wider and climbed outside. She dropped down two stories, and her feet landed in the sand with a thud. Right away, even though it was dark, she saw the pawprints and she followed the tracks far into the desert. The sand was the color of moonlight and the cactus grew eight feet high. All she had to do was sit down, and the coyote came right over to her, curled up by her feet, and put its head in her lap.

It didn't seem to matter if the coyote was her pet, or if she'd been captured. When she reached down she could feel its heart beating against its ribs, and she felt elated to be so close to something so wild. She stayed in the desert all night, and by morning she had learned all of the coyote's secrets: she knew which cactus were rich with hidden water, and how to follow a path along sharp, bone-colored rocks. She knew how to stand so still on the top of a high ridge that rabbits ran right past you, and hawks mistook you for stone and tried to light on your shoulders. At last she knew the moment when the night was so pure, you could fight it all you wanted and still—sooner or later—you'd throw back your head and howl.

When she got back to the motel she climbed up the railing, then crouched on the window ledge. Everyone in the Holiday Inn was asleep, covered by white sheets, dreaming of home. There was sand all along the window ledge and it spilled onto the wall-to-wall carpeting. Once Jessup turned in his sleep, and Rae held her breath. But even though he opened his eyes briefly, he didn't see her at the window, and he never heard her climb down onto the carpet, where she slept curled up at the very edge of the room.

When Rae woke up it was dawn, and she knew that she had to get out. She needed fresh air, and breakfast, and a change of clothes. Jessup didn't wake up when she ran the shower; he didn't hear the window close, he didn't hear the door. She would think about losing him later, but this morning all she wanted was to get across the desert before noon. She left the motel room exactly as it had been before she arrived. The air conditioner was still on; the pipes in the walls made a murmuring sound; in the bathroom there were a bottle of tequila, a package of disposable razors, a plastic container of Dixie cups. Only two things were missing when Rae left: the car keys were no longer on top of the night table, and out in the parking lot the space where Jessup had left the Oldsmobile the night before was empty. By the time Jessup woke up the asphalt in the parking lot was already beginning to sizzle. By noon it would reach a hundred and fifteen degrees. But by then Rae was already out on the freeway, and with all the windows in the Oldsmobile rolled down, the only thing she could feel was a perfect arc of wind.

PART TWO

O
N THE NIGHT LILA GAVE
birth to her daughter she had already walked up two flights of stairs before she realized she couldn't go any farther. She held on to the iron banister and slowly sank to the floor. In the middle of a terribly cold winter, there had been an oddly warm week, with rain instead of snow, and everyone in the city seemed sluggish and out of sorts. Lila's parents had come to agree that their daughter's strange behavior was caused by a combination of the weather and the mysterious pains of being eighteen. Ever since autumn, Lila had refused to wear anything but the same wide, blue dress, which hung from her shoulders like a sack. She refused suppers and lunches, yet she looked heavy and she walked as if off balance. At night, the next-door neighbors could hear her crying, and when she finally slept nothing could wake her, not even a siren right outside the apartment building. No one had dared to ask Lila what was wrong for fear she might tell them. And so, it had not been very difficult for her to keep her pregnancy a secret. But on that day in January, when her legs gave out and she sat huddled on the second-floor landing, Lila knew there was just so much you could hide.

Lila was expected home for dinner, but she sat in the stairwell for nearly an hour. Outside the sky filled with huge white clouds. The weather was changing that night, dropping five degrees an hour, and Lila tried to convince herself that the sudden shift in the atmosphere was what made her feel so exhausted and sick. In her calculations she had at least six more weeks to go. Lila was still stunned by what had happened to her, and every time the baby moved she was amazed all over again. On those rare days when she accepted that she was indeed pregnant, she could never quite believe she would actually give birth. Perhaps after nine months of pregnancy the process would reverse itself: the baby would slowly dissolve, forming, at the very last, a nearly perfect pearl, which Lila would carry inside her forever. But there on the stairs, Lila knew that something was happening to her. When she found the strength to stand up a wave began somewhere near her heart; it traveled downward in a rush, and then, without warning, exploded. Suddenly, Lila's dress was drenched, from the waist to the hem, and as she climbed up the stairs a trail of warm water was left behind that would not begin to evaporate until the following day.

Lila managed to get into the apartment unnoticed, then she undressed and crawled into bed. When her parents realized she was home they came to knock on her door, but by that time Lila's voice was steady enough to call that she was really too tired to join them for dinner. She closed her eyes then, and waited, and she was in her own small bed, in that room where she'd slept every night of her life, when her labor pains began. At first it was nothing more than mild cramps, as if she had pulled the muscles in her back. But the cramps came and went in a regular pattern, and no matter how hard Lila willed the pain to stop it rose upward; it was climbing to the roof. The movement of time changed altogether; it seemed as if only two minutes had passed since Lila had managed to sneak into her room—but it was more than two hours later when the pain began to take on a life of its own. There was a steady rhythm it complied to, and as the pain gained control, Lila panicked. She jumped out of bed, pulled a blanket around her, then ran out of her room and into the hallway. Lila's parents had long finished dinner, but her father was still at the table reading the newspaper, and her mother was returning the dishes to the cabinet in the dining room. When Lila's mother saw her daughter in the hallway with a wool blanket wrapped around her and her dark hair flying wildly, she dropped a large platter which broke into a thousand pieces on the wooden floor.

“Something's wrong,” Lila screamed. Her voice did not sound at all like her voice, and though her parents were only a few feet away, Lila was certain that she had to yell to be heard. “I have to go to a hospital,” she cried. “Something's happening to me.”

Lila's mother ran over and put a hand on her daughter's forehead to check for fever, but a strong contraction came that made Lila drop down and crouch on the floor. Through the wave of pain, Lila could hear her mother shrieking, and the moment she was able to stand again her mother slapped her face so hard that Lila could feel her neck snap backward. It was then Lila's parents began to argue and accuse each other of stupidity, lunacy, and every other parental crime possible. They nearly forgot that Lila was there in the room with them. At last, her mother and father both agreed that an ambulance's siren was too deep a shame for them to endure, and so Lila's cousin, who was a nurse in the emergency room at Beekman Hospital, would have to be called.

At that point, Lila didn't really care what was decided. It didn't matter that her mother was crying hot tears as she telephoned Lila's cousin, or that her father had already left the apartment, even though he had no place to go—too humiliated to sit in the lobby or ask a neighbor for a glass of water or tea, he went to the stairwell and sat there, and prayed that no one he knew would see him. Lila let them make all the decisions. When they refused to take her to the hospital, she went back to her room and knelt by the side of the bed. After a while, she put her face down on the cold sheet and gripped the mattress with both hands. She felt herself slipping into something dark, and each time a contraction came her waist was ringed with a band of fire. Each time the band grew hotter, until finally it threatened to burn right through her spine. One thing Lila knew: she could not live through this kind of suffering. But even now, she didn't dare scream and bring the neighbors running. She simply begged for someone to help her, and although her mother must have heard her she did nothing more than come into the hallway and quietly close the bedroom door.

The night grew so cold that when it began to rain the drops froze the moment they hit the sidewalk. There were hundreds of accidents: cars and buses skidded on the icy avenues, lights in hotel rooms flickered as generators came to a halt, pipes froze and then burst, and every frail tree in the city was hidden beneath a shower of ice. Up in her room, Lila was surrounded by black fire. She might have slipped into the darkness forever if her cousin Ann hadn't arrived a little after midnight. The bedroom door opened slowly, and the scraping of wood against wood sounded like the flapping of some huge bird's wings. Lila gasped when the sudden light from the hallway filled her room. For one calm moment Lila wondered if she had imagined the pain, and she watched as her cousin took off her gray wool coat and her leather boots. Before the bedroom door was closed Lila had enough time to look out and see her mother peer into the bedroom. At least, Lila thought it was her mother—she wore her mother's clothes, and was her mother's shape and size. But if it really had been her mother, wouldn't she have run into the room and thrown her arms around her daughter and tried to save her? Lila blinked and strained to see, but the figure in the hallway just grew shadowier, and when Lila's cousin walked toward the door she blocked the light, and then there weren't even any shadows. There was nothing at all.

When the door closed the sound echoed. Lila could actually feel the sound somewhere beneath her skin. Immediately the room was airless; the heat in the radiator poured out until it was impossible to breathe. That was when Lila knew she couldn't have this baby.

“I'm sorry,” she told her cousin. “They made you come here for nothing. I've changed my mind. I'm not going through with this.”