Read Online Fortune's Daughter by Alice Hoffman - Free Book Online

in the middle,” Carolyn said. “Don’t you see?”
    Jessup was at the front door; he knocked once, and when Rae didn’t answer he fumbled for the key.
    â€œI just called to let you know I was all right,” Rae said, but she wasn’t—she’d never felt more alone in her life. Any second Jessup would walk through the door—if he discovered that she had called Boston there might be a scene. He might tell her to take the bus back home if she missed the place so much, and now Rae knew that she couldn’t—by now they had gotten rid of the furniture in her bedroom, they had probably changed the locks on all the doors.
    â€œIs that the only reason you called?” Carolyn said in a small voice, as though she actually expected Rae to say that she missed her.
    â€œI really have to go,” Rae said, and she hung up the phone and ran to get the door just as Jessup was letting himself in.
    That night she couldn’t sleep. She went into the living room and sat in the dark, the phone balanced on her lap. She dialed the area code for Boston, and then the number for the local weather report. It was much colder in Boston—forty degrees—and by morning a pale frost would appear on the lawns and between cabbage leaves in backyard gardens. On nights when she couldn’t sleep, all Rae had to do was ask Jessup to hold her and he would; he might even sit up with her and watch a movie on TV if she asked the right way. But right then, the only person Rae wanted was her mother. If she closed her eyes she could smell Carolyn’s perfume, she could feel how cold the windowpanes were in her third-floor bedroom on nights when the moon was full and a web of ice formed on the glass.
    Later, when it was nearly dawn, Rae went into the bathroom. When she discovered a line of blood on her thigh, she sat down on the rim of the tub and cried. The sky had turned pearl gray and the crickets were still calling when Rae got into bed beside Jessup. She could tell he was dreaming; he held on to the pillow so tightly that his knuckles were white. As Rae pulled the sheet over them, Jessup woke up.
    â€œI was dreaming,” he said.
    â€œI know,” Rae told him. “I was watching you.”
    â€œIt was summer,” Jessup said. “There were a million stars in the sky and I was waiting outside your house, but you didn’t see me.”
    Rae put her arms around him. “I saw you,” she told him, but Jessup was already back asleep.
    After that night, Rae risked the subject of children every now and then, but Jessup’s reaction was always the same.
    â€œTake a good look at me,” he would tell her. “Do I look like somebody’s father?”
    Rae had to admit that he didn’t. Even when she really tried she couldn’t imagine him getting up at two in the morning, or changing a diaper, or shopping for a crib.
    â€œAll a baby will do is come between us,” Jessup warned her. “Is that what you want? Because if that’s what you want let’s go into the bedroom right now and make the biggest mistake we ever made.”
    But this time there was a difference. This time Jessup wasn’t around to convince Rae that it was a mistake. Jessup was out in the desert where the moonlight turned nights colder than any winter in Boston. He was turning in his sleep, unaware that Rae had already decided. Whether he liked it or not he was about to become somebody’s father.
    Rae took the bus to Barstow on a day when it was impossible to look at the sky and not think of heaven. After a while there was less traffic and the road opened up. Now, each passenger who got on brought some of the desert into the bus, so that a fine cover of sand drifted across the aisles. Even through the dusty windows you could tell how blue the sky was, and all along the roadside there were tuberous wildflowers that were so sweet they attracted bees the size of a man’s