Fortune's Daughter (17 page)

Actually, he had, and afterward she'd wondered if she'd imagined it. He was walking her home one night; as usual they had stopped on the corner before Rae's block. That was the night he told her that he planned to leave Boston. He hadn't been looking at her, but as she watched Jessup, Rae felt as though she could see the shell around him crack open, and for a second she could see inside him.

“I mean, it's totally up to you,” he had said casually. “I'm used to being alone, but if you want to go I'm not going to stop you.”

“Maybe I will leave with you,” Rae said, trying to sound just as casual. After that she kept sneaking looks at Jessup, searching for that crack in his shell, and at certain angles she could almost see it. But she never again had the sense that she was looking inside him, and it began to seem ridiculous that she had once imagined she could see past his skin to a thin band of light.

Whatever had happened, she had certainly never felt chosen by Jessup, and now it didn't matter who had done the choosing.

“I'll never forgive you for this,” Rae said.

“I guess not,” Jessup said.

They were at the corral when Hal drove up with the groceries. They turned to watch him carry the bags into the trailer.

“Don't you care that this is your baby?” Rae asked Jessup once Hal had gone inside.

“What if I did?” Jessup said. “What good would it do me? Even if I wanted to
be
his father, how could I be? I'd just ruin it—I'd end up disappearing and the guy would hate me in the end, so I might as well get all that over with now.” Jessup lit a cigarette. It was windy, so he had to cup the lit match in his hand. “If we had planned it, it might have been different,” he said. “I could have gotten some place like this ranch before, and by the time the kid was born I would have been rich.”

She knew he wasn't going to give her any of the money back, and somehow Rae didn't even care any more. She gave him back his sweater and walked over to the Oldsmobile. The engine took a while to turn over, and once it did Rae had to pump the gas to keep it going. Through the closed car windows she could still smell the horses. If she hadn't been pregnant she might have actually considered moving here, in spite of the waitress and the fact that he hadn't even asked her to stay. Usually, she didn't take up much space—she could have slept beside him in the bunk bed, her spine against the metal wall. It would have been easy enough to wash all the dirty dishes with boiling-hot water, and the clothes left strewn on the floor would have taken a half hour at most to hang up. At night, the horses would run in circles, and the coyotes would come down from the hills to watch them, a little braver and a little closer to the corral each time. But, of course, she was no longer really alone, and Jessup would never be able to understand her putting somebody before him.

Just as she was about to leave, Jessup walked over and tapped on the window. After Rae rolled it down, he surprised them both by taking her hand. For a moment Rae swore she could see the stream of light just beneath his skin, but she forced herself to look away.

When Rae put the car in gear Jessup let go of her hand. But before she drove back onto the dirt driveway Rae turned to him and smiled.

“You're going to miss me,” she said, and she didn't even give him a chance to disagree.

In Barstow, Rae stopped at a diner and got herself a sandwich to go, which she ate as she drove over the mountains. There was a thin cover of snow on the ground, and even though the altitude was higher, it was already easier to breathe. By the time she reached the flatlands it was possible to pick up L.A. radio stations. The air grew warm enough to turn the car heater off. She wasn't thinking about Jessup, she was thinking about those horses, and the more she thought about them the more relieved she was that she didn't have to spend another moment watching them move along the wooden fence. The whole time she had been with Jessup she had been seeing those horses. Even when she wasn't looking she could still see them out of the corner of her eye, like a shadow that kept getting in the way of her line of vision.

She got home in the middle of the afternoon. After she'd parked the Oldsmobile and gotten out she noticed a Volkswagen parked in front of the entrance to the apartment complex. As she walked by she could tell that the man in the driver's seat was watching her, and halfway across the courtyard she knew that he was following her. Rae walked faster and kept her keys between her fingers, sharp edge out. When she heard him clear his throat she started to run. For the first time in weeks she wished desperately that Jessup were in the apartment and that all she had to do was shout his name and he'd open the front door.

“Are you Rae?” she heard the man behind her call.

She kept running.

“Rae?” he called.

She turned and faced him. He was standing in the middle of the courtyard watching her.

“What if I am?” Rae said. She was less than fifty feet from her own door, and if she ran she could make it there before he had the chance to move.

“I'm Richard Grey,” he told her. “Lila's husband.”

Now that he was here he felt slightly ridiculous. He'd found her address in Lila's phone book, but it was really none of his business.

Rae looked over her shoulder, at her front door. Being afraid had started her wishing for Jessup, and now she found she couldn't stop. It was almost as if the man she wanted was someone other than the one she had just left in the desert. The Jessup she wanted was waiting for her at home. Together they felt so safe they could keep the door unlocked at all hours of the day and night and not feel as if they were in any danger.

“Is something wrong?” Rae managed to ask.

“Lila's gone,” Richard told her.

“What do you mean—gone?” Rae said.

“She went to New York,” Richard said. “I knew you were counting on her to be your labor coach, so I thought I'd better tell you. I've been trying you on the phone, but no one's ever home.”

“Wait a second,” Rae said. “She promised me.”

“Well, she's back in New York,” Richard said. In the empty courtyard his voice sounded hollow. “That's where we come from,” he added, as though it explained something.

Rae felt her face get hot. “You can't depend on anybody,” she said.

“So what do you think?” Richard said to her now. “Do you think she's coming back?”

Rae looked at him carefully and realized that he was crying. She looked away, embarrassed, but she couldn't help wondering what it would be like to be loved that much.

“Sure,” Rae said. “She'll come back.”

She was certain that after she'd left this morning Jessup had gone on with his plans for the day. He wouldn't start to miss her till later, and then he'd borrow Hal's car and drive to Barstow. He'd look up that waitress or somebody new, and the whole time he was missing her, he'd be holding somebody else.

Richard had collected himself, and he was particularly grateful that Rae hadn't looked at him while he'd been crying.

“I guess I'll go home,” he said.

“That's a good idea,” Rae agreed. “Maybe she'll call you.”

They looked at each other then and laughed.

“It's hell waiting for a phone call,” Rae said.

“How about a drink?” Richard said suddenly, and then he seemed flustered. “I didn't mean alcohol,” he explained. “I was thinking about something cold.”

Actually, Rae knew that what he wanted wasn't a drink. It was just some company.

“Sure,” she said.

Richard followed her across the courtyard, then waited while she unlocked the door and went to turn on the lights. His pain was so evident that Rae almost forgot her own as she led him into the kitchen and poured them both glasses of cold, blue milk. It made it a little easier to come home when someone was sitting across the table, and because neither of them wanted to leave, they drank two glasses of milk apiece, and after a while Rae had to admit she could use a little company, too.

PART FOUR

I
T WAS SNOWING WHEN LILA
first got to New York, and that made her arrival easier. Everything was white, and when she took the limousine from Kennedy Airport into Manhattan she could have been anywhere: in the middle of a frozen city in Europe, deep in the iciest part of Canada. She was dropped off at the Hilton, and it felt so anonymous there that she stayed. She ordered room service and had her dinner at a table by the window on the twenty-third floor. Below her was a grid of lights. Each time a building dared to seem familiar it was swallowed up by snow; this high up above the city it almost seemed as if Lila was farther away from New York now than she had been for the past twenty-seven years.

At midnight Lila got into bed, but every time she closed her eyes she thought she heard something, and at a little after two she got up and turned off the steam heat. In the morning it was so cold that ice formed inside windowpanes all over the city. Lila ordered breakfast from room service, and then, when the waiter had left her alone and her coffee had been poured, she took out the Manhattan Telephone Directory. Her parents were no longer listed, and when she dialed the old number, which she was surprised to find she still knew by heart, a stranger answered and insisted she'd had the number for more than fifteen years.

She would get the information out of them no matter what. She didn't care how old they'd become: she would shake her mother by her shoulders until her fragile bones snapped, she would stare her father down no matter how sightless his eyes had become. She got dressed and went down to the lobby at a little after ten. Her wool coat was much too thin for a New York winter, and even after she had gotten into a cab she was still freezing. She gave the driver her old address and sat on the edge of the back seat. The city seemed much more complicated, and there was so much more of everything: traffic, and lights, and fear. When they got there Lila made the driver circle the block four times before she admitted that her building was gone. The old brownstones had been knocked down and a new co-op had taken their place, and it was the oddest feeling to be back on her old street without really being there at all. She had the driver circle the block one last time while she tried to decide what to do. She could feel herself begin to panic. All she could think of were the smallest details from her past: the numbers of the buses that used to run crosstown, the varieties of flowers their neighbors used to keep in a window box, how many cracks in the sidewalk had to be stepped over and avoided when she walked from the front stoop to the candy store.

“This is costing you money,” the driver reminded her. “Not that I'm complaining.”

“The building's gone,” Lila said. Her voice sounded higher than it should, as if she were still eighteen and so shy she could barely bring herself to ask customers in the restaurant what they'd like for lunch.

“Yeah, well, that happens,” the driver assured her. “How about trying another address?”

They drove to Third Avenue, but when they reached the corner Lila told the driver not to stop. As they passed by the spot where the restaurant used to be, Lila rolled down her window. Hannie always walked west when she left the restaurant in the evenings; if Lila worked late she could sometimes look out and see Hannie looking through the wooden boxes of vegetables in the market down the block, choosing the right head of cabbage or pointing to three perfect apples with a bony finger before she reached for the change purse she kept pinned to the inside pocket of her black skirt.

All the time Lila had been away she had imagined New York to be exactly as she had left it. Pigeons still sat on the ledge outside her bedroom window, her mother made pot roast every Friday night in the cast-iron roasting pan she had inherited from Lila's grandmother. At night the sky was inky, apartments were always overheated and hallways much too cold, and on Third Avenue, at the rear table, you could find out everything you had ever wanted to know for fifty cents. It was almost as if Lila had truly believed that she could be eighteen again, and that one ticket on a jet from Los Angeles to New York could buy back all the things she had lost. There was only one more address that might be worth something—her aunt and uncle's apartment on 86th Street. They were her cousin Ann's parents, and by now they'd be quite elderly. Lila had spent holidays at their apartment. The adults had always sat in the living room, drinking wine and eating small apple cakes. The children had been relegated to the bedroom, where they could make as much noise as they liked.

Ann, older than the rest of the cousins, would lock herself away in the second, smaller bedroom. They could hear her radio through the bedroom wall, always the same thing, Frank Sinatra, and the cousins made fun of her behind her back and called her Frankie's girl. Once, when the cousins were being particularly obnoxious, opening the windows and tossing crumpled newspapers onto anyone who happened to walk by, Lila had gone out into the hallway, pushed open her cousin's bedroom door a bit, and looked in. The radio was on and Ann was lying on her bed, writing in her diary. When she saw Lila at the door she rushed over and slammed it shut, so hard that it made Lila jump. Lila was twelve years old, and because she felt that nobody wanted her, she stayed right there in the hallway. Then and there she decided that she would never come to another family get-together again, and when her parents were ready to go and called out her name, they were surprised to find her waiting by the door, already wearing her coat and her hat.

She had never gone back to that apartment again, although when the driver now pulled up it seemed as if she had been there only days ago. She went in through the first set of doors. It was dark in the foyer, just as it had been the last time she'd been there, when her hair was so long it fell to her waist, even after it had been braided. Her parents had been arguing, so Lila was the one to ring upstairs, and she'd stood on tiptoes to reach the buzzer.